WAmanda Melissa Baggs, also known as Amelia E. Voicy Baggs, was an American autistic and non-binary blogger who predominantly wrote on the subject of autism. Baggs used a communication device to speak and had been referred to as low-functioning. They died on April 11, 2020.
WOrson Bean was a veteran American film, television, and stage actor, and a comedian, writer, and producer. He was a game show and talk show host and a "mainstay of Los Angeles’s small theater scene." He appeared frequently on several televised game shows from the 1960s through the 1980s and was a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. "A storyteller par excellence", he was a favorite of Johnny Carson, appearing on The Tonight Show over 200 times.
WMurray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called communalism, which seeks to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought.
WDan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
WRusty DeWees is an American actor, producer and writer. He works regionally in Vermont, Off-Broadway, in television, and films. He is best known for his one-man comedy show, The Logger.
WJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
WWilliam Isaac Fletcher was an American librarian, bibliographer, and indexer who served as the head librarian of Amherst College from 1883 to 1911 and the President of the American Library Association in 1891-92. In 1951, he was named by Library Journal to the Library Hall of Fame.
WDaniel Wynne Gade was a professor of Geography at the University of Vermont and a prominent member of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography. His main interests were in the fields of cultural geography and historical geography, as well as ethnobotany, cultural ecology, and mountain research. His regional focus was on the Central Andes of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia; moreover, Gade also investigated cultural landscapes of francophone Canada, Spain and Portugal, highland Madagascar, southern France and northern Italy. He was born in Niagara Falls, New York.
WStanley "Huck" Gutman is an American academic and political advisor. He is a Professor of English at the University of Vermont and former Chief of Staff to presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. He is the co-author of Sanders's political memoir, Outsider in the White House.
WThomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, former psychotherapist, businessman, and progressive political commentator. Hartmann has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, The Thom Hartmann Program, since 2003 and hosted a nightly television show, The Big Picture, between 2010 and September 2017.
WMichael Mahon Hastings was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and he attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in an ambush, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the insurgency that took her life.
WJames Kochalka is an American comic book artist and writer, and rock musician. His comics are noted for their blending of the real and the surreal. Largely autobiographical, Kochalka's cartoon expression of the world around him includes such real-life characters as his wife, children, cat, friends and colleagues, but always filtered through his own observations and flights of whimsy. In March 2011 he was declared the cartoonist laureate of Vermont, serving a term of three years.
WMadeleine May Kunin is an American diplomat, author and politician. She served as the 77th Governor of Vermont from 1985 until 1991, as a member of the Democratic Party. She also served as United States Ambassador to Switzerland from 1996 to 1999. She was Vermont's first and, to date, only female governor as well as the first Jewish governor of Vermont. She was also the first Jewish woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state. Kunin is currently a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont.
WTheodora A. Peck was an American author and poet from Vermont. She published several historical novels when she was in her twenties and thirties, and her poems were published in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals throughout her life.
WMelusina Fay "Zina" Peirce, born Harriet Melusina Fay in Burlington, Vermont, was an American feminist, author, teacher, music critic, organizer and activist best known for spearheading the 19th century "cooperative housekeeping" movement. Peirce believed that gender equality would only come with women's economic independence and "identified the cause of women's economic and intellectual oppression as unpaid, unspecialized domestic work." Her proposed solution to this oppression was "cooperative housekeeping," a system in which women would do domestic chores together and profit from it by requesting payment from their husbands. An important component of her plan was the spatial reorganization of neighborhoods and homes to accommodate domestic cooperation between women.