William Hobart Dickey (1928-1994) was born in Bellingham, Washington, to Paul Condit Dickey and Anne Hobart Dickey. He attended Reed College, graduating with a BA in 1951, earned his MA from Harvard in 1955, and was awarded an MFA in 1956 from the State University of Iowa. His first collection of poetry, Of the Festivity, was selected to be published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1959. In that same year Dickey was awarded a Fulbright for study at Oxford University and married Shirley Marn (they divorced in 1973). He taught at Cornell and Denison universities before settling at San Francisco State University where he taught for almost 30 years. His poetry was widely published in magazines as well as in 15 books. Dickey set up his own press, the Senex Press, in San Francisco in 1989 and printed a handful of works by him and other poets. His partner for many years was Tommy Palmares and then Leonard Sanazaro, who was also his executor. His work received a large number of prestigious poetry prizes including the Juniper Prize, and he received creative writing fellowships and awards. He died from complications arising from surgeries.