January 23, 1949 - August 5, 2025
The loving family and beloved friends of Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory sadly announce her passing on August 5, 2025, in Tallahassee, Florida. “Jerri” was born January 23, 1949, in Gary, Indiana to Henrietta Vivian Fox McGregory and Jerry McGregory. Her parents instilled a love of learning and after attending high school at Tolleston High School in Gary, she went on to achieve many degrees and awards. She got a B.A. in English at Illinois Wesleyan University, an M.A. in English at Purdue University, and an M.P.S. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. Her studies culminated in a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time of her untimely passing, she was completing her two-year term as a member of the American Folklore Society’s Executive Board.
Jerrilyn had a childhood passion for the written word which she carried into her work as a mentor, educator, and writer. She authored three books: Wiregrass Country (1997), Downhome Gospel: African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country (2010), and One Grand Noise: Boxing Day in the Anglicized Caribbean World (2021). She was honored with the Chicago Folklore Prize in 2022 for One Grand Noise. She authored many articles and conference presentations on African American folklore and traditions. Click here for further information about her academic writings and contributions posted on her Emerita Professor faculty page.
Lest we forget, her first career was as a social worker in Northwest Indiana. Certainly this work informed her Master’s thesis at Cornell on African American naming patterns and her sense of shared community, as outlined in her work on the Wiregrass Region of the South. At the time of her death, she was hard at work on a book project with the working title: Aareck to Zsaneka: African American Naming Patterns, culminating a career-long interest in African American onomastics.
Dr. McGregory’s family remembers her as always present, retelling the stories of the family and instilling confidence in her children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. She is sitting beside her son, William Robinson, brother Richard McGregory, and her beloved parents. She is survived by her sons Keith Robinson, MD and Julian Robinson, her adoring grandchildren Syrus, Kalli, and Elijah, and her sister Sandra Dowdell. Her many friends, colleagues and students mourn her passing. The family requests that donations be made to the Epilepsy Foundation (https://www.epilepsy.com/) and Butterfly World (https://butterflyworld.com/).
-- Tallahassee Democrat obituary
English department memories
Dr. McGregory retired from her faculty position at FSU at the beginning of August 2023. At the time, then-department chair and Professor Gary Taylor wrote in an email announcing her retirement: "Professor McGregory came to FSU thirty years ago, and during those three decades she has been instrumental in transforming the department's curriculum—and also in transforming the minds and lives of countless individual students. She was here when most of us (me included) arrived, and it's hard to imagine the English department and the Williams Building without her. There is, truly, no one else like her."
In a follow-up email, Professor Maxine Montgomery wrote, "Many thanks, Jerrilyn, for your selfless dedication to our students and the profession at large. Your contribution to our department, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the University is incalculable and we will miss you." English Associate Professor Alisha Gaines added, "It is rare in the academy to have a senior colleague who is both Black and a woman. In 2011, I joined the faculty here at FSU grateful for, and inspired by, Jerrilyn. From her wicked smart, award-winning scholarship to her courage and intellectual generosity, Dr. McGregory is a model for the rest of us."
In an August 5, 2025, email to the department, chair and Professor Andrew Epstein wrote, "It is with deep sadness that I share the news that Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, Emerita Professor of English at FSU, has passed away. As many of you know, Dr. McGregory recently retired in 2023 after a long and distinguished career as a faculty member at FSU.
"Jerrilyn was also an invaluable member of the English Department in her roles as teacher and departmental citizen. She served as our Director of Undergraduate Studies and in many other service roles over the years, helped shape and transform our curriculum, and influenced so many lives as a dedicated and beloved teacher and mentor for several generations of FSU students.
"Jerrilyn leaves behind an enduring legacy, and she will be sorely missed by all of us in the FSU English community."
Shortly after her retirement, Dr. McGregory agreed to answer these questions via email.
What was your inspiration to join FSU’s Department of English when you left your tenure-track faculty position at the University of Georgia?
My primary inspiration depended on FSU’s proximity to Wiregrass Country. I decided to move South after writing my dissertation on African American urban folklore, and I desired to experience southern culture because the oral histories of many key informants in Philly migrated North. Once hired at UGA, University Press of Mississippi contacted me to contribute to its “Regions of the South” series, and Wiregrass Country constituted the only listing pertinent to a tri-state region including Georgia. Now under contract and eager to start, I never considered publishing my dissertation or limiting my study to Wiregrass Georgia. I had summer funding from UGA, still a five-hour drive away from the region; what a conundrum. I had decided to rent a trailer in Cairo, Georgia, and it so happened I visited Strozier Library one day. I noted a job posting there, and luckily, the English department decided to have me. I published two books based in my early research as a result: Wiregrass Country and Downhome Gospel: African American Spiritual Activism in Wiregrass Country.
Your time at FSU spanned three decades. Could you please write about the friendships you made with other department faculty members?
I’m ambivalent about answering…I am glad that you ask the question so that I can apologize for not befriending more colleagues. I blame my ethnographic fieldwork as one contributing factor; the Wiregrass comprises nine counties in Florida and Alabama, along with a third of Georgia. I was new to the South and, relatively speaking, this region is historically and culturally like no other. I also need to be excused due to my casting an even wider net to study Boxing Day as relates to its vast multi-site necessities, meaning I spent over a decade traveling over winter breaks to Bermuda, The Bahamas, St. Croix, St. Kitts-Nevis, Belize; and I spent my summers in South Florida to conduct archival research and more site visits.
Of course, I must acknowledge English faculty members Professor Maxine Montgomery and Professor Candace Ward, along with perennial office staff members for allowing me to catch-up with them on the fly over the years. Moreover, with all the new hires and the virtual department meetings, every now and then a “hello” is all that I could muster, except for Professor Christopher Okonkwo, whom I befriended long ago as a top graduate student in the English department. Of course, I wasn’t this recalcitrant all these years, but too many of these are no longer around, especially English faculty emeriti Dennis Moore and Bruce Bickley—who drove me to see the one place he knew of where wiregrass still grows within this fire ecosystem.
You developed four new courses for the department: African American Folklore & Literature (in 2012); Folklore (2011); Senior Seminar: A Polycentric Approach to Literature (2009); and African American Folklore (2007). Could you please write about the importance of including these studies in the curriculum?
I loved the opportunity to teach both African American Folklore and Literature courses because I detest anthologies, and they allowed me to undertake other approaches dependent on distinct genres and contexts. I recently saw a student from my last AFAM folklore class that surveyed multiple cultural traditions through the lens of hip hop, and he expressed his enjoyment to me. As a hybrid course, the arrangement allowed students to meet face-to-face once weekly so that they might engage fieldwork techniques and report on site visits pertinent to the course. When packing up my office, I couldn’t resist keeping dozens of them to reread.
The “Polycentric” course is a graduate class, which I’ve taught periodically privileging W. Lawrence Hogue’s theory that pivots the center away from a single politicized ideology for African Americans, who often experience racism alike, but live distinctive socially constructed realities. Not long after I retired, I read two texts by virtually unknown mid-century male authors that caused me to regret retiring because they suited the course even better than the books I previously endorsed. I felt compelled eventually to teach onomastics in the Folklore course and those students dispelled any reservations I previously had. From place names to pharmaceuticals to cars and a host of interdisciplinary approaches, they endured and surprised me with another final paper collection to “archive.”