Greenfield, MA – Mary Clare Powell was the kind of person who could light up a room with her spirit and her smile. She was well educated, including a master’s degree in The History of Ideas from Johns Hopkins University and a Doctorate from U. Mass Amherst, in Creativity, but her knowing went far beyond academia. She had such an abundance of human knowing, a magnetism, that made her seem magical. Her mode was noticing and accepting. She would focus on people around her with big smiles for everyone and take every opportunity to create adventure, bringing joy wherever she went.
She was known for being a fine teacher, poet, and writer. Her teaching, which she loved, included high school kids in Baltimore, MD, and at an international school in Taiwan. That got her hooked on the adventures of traveling which she did extensively throughout her life. Later as a professor for 25 years at Lesley University, Cambridge MA she led the Creative Arts in Learning Program which became foundational for graduate programs across the U.S. and in Israel.
She published: The Widow, celebrating her mother and women in general, and This Way Daybreak Comes: Women’s Values and the Future, drawn from her traveling throughout the United States interviewing almost 1000 women to document varying perspectives and lifestyles in 1980’s America. Several Women’s Studies’ programs in the U.S. used this book as a rubric for learning. She also co-edited the anthology, The Arts, Education, and Social Change. Alongside these academic endeavors, she created six books of poetry: Things Owls Ate, Academic Scat, In the Living Room, Box of Water, Everyday Ecstasy, and a large format book, Weeding, in 2024.
Those knowing her knew she was also a student of life-paying close attention to all that life had to offer, sharing observations and what she thought of as miracles with friends. Certainly, all who knew her lived more fully with her in their lives. She dared us to live large, and bold, like inviting us to go swimming in the ocean when it was 60 degrees outside, and the water was ice cold or taking a walk in 10-degree weather. “Oh, it’ll be fine” she’d say. And she was right.
She was preceded in death by her father, Kenneth Powell; her mother, Ruth (Kocher) Powell; her brother Kenneth Davis Powell; and a sister-in-law, Lydia Hitchcock Walker-losses she carried like stones in her pocket, always present and warm. She leaves behind the love of her life; Violet Walker (Vi), life partner and spouse, (just shy of 40 years), best friend, and true companion; her daughters: Natalie Sue Walker and Reba Dalson, who she loved by choice, tending that bond the way she tended everything she cared for – patiently, fiercely and with full attention. She also leaves her beloved grandchildren; Nate Walker and Lilly Clare DeViolet Dunlap (Isaiah Dunlap), who delighted her and kept her eyes open to big miracles; her brother; Scott Powell, and sister-in-law; Miki Powell, and sister-in-law; Dana Dales. She also leaves many nieces and nephews, and a wide circle of lifelong friends. She also leaves behind the hundreds of students she taught, teachers she taught, poets she influenced, who grew alongside her, some planted early, others pushing up unexpectedly, through the cracks of time and circumstance, like the weeds she so admired. She touched them all with her generosity of spirit.
There is gratitude for having been seen, cultivated, and loved by her. There were no boundaries in her love. She believed nothing that insists on living should be ignored. She taught us that attention is a form of love, and curiosity an act of courage.
It was important to her to live an open life and she would want you to know what ended her amazing and adventurous life. Mary Clare died due to a combination of bile duct liver cancer, dementia, and diabetes. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so too does it take a village to ease another’s suffering or offer solace. There was a whole-hearted team of people who made her last months, weeks, and days more comfortable. We thank all the friends, family, nurses, CNAs, Hospice workers, and doctors.
Always a student, a learner, a teacher, her generous spirit continues on after her death as she donated her body to the anatomical gift program at UMass Medical School. As for her soul/lifeforce/personality, according to physicists and the law of the conservation of energy, she is still here, just less orderly.
Her life asks something of us now: to notice, to ask, to accept, and to love more deeply than we think we have time for. A celebration of life will take place Saturday, March 28th, 2026 at 1:00pm, Second Congregational Church, Greenfield.
From her poem “In the End” from Weeding, Mary Clare Powell leaves us with these words:
I write about what I notice
as if the things I notice
receive my noticing,
as if it matters that
I see them,
as if we are all part of
the great
mystery of earthlife –
as if we help sustain