Dixie Lee Harris was born in Arkansas and spent her early years on a cotton farm during the Great Depression in the United States. She attended public schools, then took the BS in chemistry from Arkansas State College (now Arkansas State University), Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1946. Her first job was as an industrial chemist in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She then took a job as a chemist in Beacon, New York. Dissatisfied with a career as a chemist, Harris took the MA in education from Columbia University Teacher’s College, New York, New York, in 1955. Between 1955 and 1967, she traveled the world, visiting approximately sixty-seven different countries. During 1957–1960, she taught school in Alaska, during which time she was able to combine her avocation to teach with her urge to experience geographic “ultimates,” such as hiking at the Arctic Circle and the northernmost point of the United States. In 1970, Harris took the PhD from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, upon presentation of a dissertation titled “Certain Aspects of Native Education in the Americas in the 1960s”. After completing her doctoral work, she worked as a teacher in the New York State prison system at the Beacon Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York. During the last ten years of her working career, Harris was elected as a union representative and then elected to the Executive Board of the Public Employees Federation of New York State. Harris is the author of Twenty Stories of Bible Women (Hauppauge, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1980). Throughout her life, she has been interested in civil liberties, peace, labor issues, and feminism. She has been an avid enthusiast of camping, hiking, and writing. She continued to attend college courses of interest and to take brief study trips around the world until 2005. She characterizes her life as lived “during war, prosperity, exuberant living, and occasional crises”.
