Lynn Hicks

Interviewed January 30 and February 25, 2014

Lynn Hicks was born in 1946 in Columbus, Georgia, and she grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. She graduated from Auburn University in Alabama. She taught school in Atlanta, Georgia, before going to New York in 1970 for a master’s degree in art. After seven years in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where she first gardened, she moved back to the South in 1979 to have a longer growing season.

In 1980, Lynn Hicks lived on her first farm with her then-partner, who owned the farm when Lynn joined her on it. After starting farming, their attempt at a lesbian-feminist land group fizzled in 1985. Lynn and her new partner, Marilyn (known as Yahoo), rented a farm in 1987, and the following year found and bought the land that became Full Circle Farm, located near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

In addition to farming and gardening, Lynn Hicks has been a political activist since the 1970s, when she worked for abortion rights. She had also protested the lack of women artists in the Museum of Modern Art and other New York City art museums. She was involved in organizing the early days of rape crisis and battered women centers. She joined early on in the environmental movement. She participated in the School of the Americas (SOA) Watch in Columbus, Georgia; the Selma, Alabama, bridge crossing ceremonies; the Peace Walk to Montgomery, Alabama; and the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina. During her fifteen years of market gardening and farming on Full Circle Farm, she was active in organic, sustainable living, farming organizations.

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