Remembering Pamela Harrison
Sundog Poetry mourns the passing of Pamela Harrison, who served as a board member from 2016-2019.
Prior to joining the board, Harrison was featured in Sundog Poetry’s 10-part lecture series, Vermont Poets & Their Craft, which was televised by Vermont Public Television in 2015 and later released as a poetic craft book by Green Writers Press. Shortly thereafter, Pam joined the Sundog board, helping with our events programming — in particular, our poetry reading series and our youth-oriented writing workshops —and spearheading some of our most important fundraising efforts. Pam was always an attentive, uplifting presence at board meetings, especially interested in bringing poetry to under-served populations, as well as establishing avenues for emerging poets to publish their work, whether through a chapbook series or first-book prize.
Sundog Poetry was glad to have Pam as a board member not only because of her commitment to making poetry accessible to audiences throughout Vermont, but also because she herself was an award-winning poet and talented teacher, having taught poetry courses at Dartmouth College and within the NH State university system for many years. As for Pam Harrison’s own poetry, fellow board member and former VT poet laureate Chard deNiord remembers her “quiet but moving pastoral poems and moving elegies about her husband Dennis, who passed in 2016.” Fellow board member and former editor of Green Mountains Review, Neil Shepard, remembers publishing one of Pam’s dazzling poems, “Unhinged,” back in 1992, and republishing it twenty years later in GMR’s 25th Anniversary Poetry Retrospective, a sort of “greatest hits” anthology.
We will miss Pamela Harrison’s bright presence. If members of the Sundog Poetry community have memories of Pam that they’d like to share on our website, please send them to our managing director, Drew Frazier, at drew@sundogpoetry.org.
As for the highlights of her long career, we have excerpted the following from Who’s Who of Professional Women: Pamela Harrison attended Smith College, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1968. A few years later, she married Dennis McCullough, a physician for Project Hope, and his work would take them on many far-flung assignments, including stays in Finland, remote towns and villages in the Canadian Arctic and Central America, and a year on a Caribbean island with their 8- year-old daughter, Katherine. Years later, she returned to the United States and continued her education at Vermont College, where she was awarded a Master of Fine Art in poetry in 1983.
Pamela Harrison published several volumes of poetry, including Stereopticon in 2004; Okie Chronicles in 2005, a tribute to her mother’s parents; Out of Silence in 2009, a memoir in verse of her parents’ love story; What to Make of It in 2012; and Glory Bush and Green Banana in 2017. She was awarded the 2002 Northern New England Discovery Poet Award and presented with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her literary accomplishments.