Obituary: George-Thérèse Dickenson, 1951-2021 

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• George-Thérèse Dickenson

Poet, editor and activist George-Thérèse Dickenson died on June 15, 2021, in New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to her brother, John Dickenson.

With Will Bennett, Dickenson edited the magazine Assassin in the late 1970s. She published two books: Striations, from Good Gay Poets (Boston, 1976), and Transducing, from Segue (New York, 1986).

George-Thérèse Dickenson was born on October 23, 1951, in Napa, Calif., daughter of Howard George Dickinson, a lawyer, and Joanne DePuy (maiden name Cardiff), a wine and travel entrepreneur from Altadena, Calif. Dickenson was a graduate of Wellesley College. After a brief stint at UC-Berkeley, she moved to Vermont and then Boston in the early 1970s, where she became involved with the anarchist circle around Murray Bookchin. She also connected with a group of poets. In the late 1970s, she moved to lower Manhattan, where, over the next decade, Dickenson was closely involved with Larry Estridge and Peter Seaton. During that time, she taught poetry in the prisons through Janine Pommy Vega’s Incisions Arts Project. Her poems were included in a related anthology, Candles Burn in Memory Town: Poems From Both Sides of the Wall, edited by Vega (Segue/Incisions, 1988). While in New York, she struggled with substance abuse. During Dickenson's last decades, she was living in a mountaintop cabin in a nudist colony in Stockton, N.J. She is survived by her mother, her brothers John and Chuck, and her longtime partner, Bobby Astarita.

This was first published by Charles Bernstein in Jacket 2. Further recollections of George, as well as links to recordings of her reading her work, can be found at jacket2.org/commentary/george-therese-dickenson.