Kathleen Dickerson,
museum benefactor
Kathleen Dickerson, a longtime supporter of the Rogers Historical Museum throughout the last 45 years of her life, including two major museum expansion projects, left a sizable donation in her estate to help prepare the museum for its next milestone improvement.
A retired Rogers school teacher, Mrs. Dickerson left an endowment gift of $345,000 to the Rogers Museum Foundation. Only the income from this gift will be available to spend for museum capital improvements, while preserving the total of the gift unaltered, generating more income throughout the future.
The Rogers Museum Foundation is the non-governmental support organization that raised $2.5 million for the 2018 expansion project that returned the Hailey Ford building, in the 300 block of South Second, back to its classic 940s Art Deco facade to serve as the main exhibit building for the city's museum.
Mrs. Dickerson and her husband Aaron, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, moved to Rogers in 1969 to spend his retirement with his foster family.
Just five years later the Bicentennial Steering Committee of Rogers established the Rogers Historical Museum as the first local project for the Bicentennial celebration. Both Aaron and Kathleen immediately became active in the formation of a museum for their adopted city.
Both were charter members of the Friends of the Museum and actively solicited donations for display in the new museum. They worked to set up displays in the former bank building on First Street that would serve as the first home of the museum.
The Museum later received a major donation of the circa 1890s Hawkins House at Second and Cherry. Along with several other volunteers, the Dickersons became carpenters, painters, grounds keepers, movers and display designers to get the museum ready to be opened in the house.
Only two years after the doors of the museum first opened to guests, Mrs. Dickerson was appointed by the mayor to serve as a member of the Rogers Historical Museum Commission, the governing body of the museum.
Although a member of the governing body, she never slowed down her work as a volunteer, doing any job that she felt needed to be done, from guiding visitors through the Hawkins House to running the vacuum cleaner when she noticed a spot the custodian had missed. Aaron passed away in 1988, but Kathleen continued her volunteer work in addition to duties as commissioner.
The Friends of the Museum awarded Kathleen a Lifetime Service Award in 1997 for outstanding service.
In 2018 she was further honored for her service when the educational department of the museum, located in the Key Wing adjacent to the Hawkins House, was named in her honor.
Mrs. Dickerson was still serving on the Museum Commission at the time of her recent death.
"The Rogers Historical Museum will forever be indebted to Mrs. Dickerson for her tireless service, leadership and generosity," Gail Shepherd, Foundation vice chairman, said.
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Writers' Colony
emerging poets
The Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow has announced the winners of the 2021 "Emerging Poet" fellowship for writers assembling their first published book of poems. Two winners, L. Renée and Seif-Eldeine Och, were selected from 41 applications received from writers across the country. They will each receive a two-week residency at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow.
L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. She is a third-year MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she has served as nonfiction editor of Indiana Review and associate director of the Indiana University Writers' Conference. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been anthologized in Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak: Volume 6. She is the recipient of the Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing, Appalachian Review's Denny C. Plattner Award, and second-place winner of the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize from PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review. Her poems have been published or forthcoming in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the Minnesota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sheila-na-gig Online, and elsewhere.
Seif-Eldeine Och is a Syrian-American poet with a degree in Middle Eastern studies from Tufts University and an MFA in poetry from Lesley University. He has been a finalist for the Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. He has been published in the Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, and Star 82 Review, among others. You can read his stream-of-consciousness poetry at patreon.com/seifeldeine.
Information: (479) 253-7444 or writerscolony.org.
