Dorothy Louise Zimmerman

Dorothy “Dotty” Zimmerman died peacefully in the arms of her boys at home on August 16, 2026, after facing ovarian cancer for the second time. She was 66. She loved to cook and bake. She loved Florida Gator sports. She loved words and ideas and the people willing to wrestle seriously with either. She was a tremendous mother, grandmother, and mentor because she expected people to be capable of more, and then helped them discover that they were.

Born February 9, 1960, in Louisville, Kentucky, Dotty was the second youngest of eight Curtsinger children. An upbringing that undoubtedly provided an early education in diplomacy, competition, resourcefulness, and the practical necessity of making yourself heard.

Throughout her life, she could be heard with a pen, a typewriter, a keyboard, or simply a well-timed sentence spoken across a room. For nearly thirty years, she devoted her talents to the University of Florida, including her work with the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and Florida Sea Grant. She worked with young people, colleagues, scholars, public officials, and elected leaders with the conviction that public service was not an abstraction. Her work was a passion. Dotty believed the world could be made better, even if only by the smallest of margins. A student encouraged. A photograph taken. An article written. A sentence made clearer. A person persuaded to care.

Her words reflected the woman herself: precise when precision mattered, forceful when force was required, and unreserved in her love when love was needed most. This should surprise no one who knew her.

Far from her Kentucky upbringing, she recreated home holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving in Spanish and Portuguese, improvising when familiar ingredients could not be found and preserving the traditions that mattered while cheerfully inventing new ones when necessary. While she lived in Venezuela and Brazil, she learned languages, navigated cultures, endured political upheaval, coups, kidnappings, shortages of ordinary goods, and built a home for her family wherever home happened to be. That was Dotty: if the world failed to provide the proper ingredients, she made dinner anyway.

She raised two boys, Andrew and Thomas, into men. Along the way, she also gathered people into her life with a maternal generosity that did not depend much on biology. There were daughters and there were sons acquired by affection, circumstance, friendship, and Dotty’s apparent belief that a family could always accommodate another chair.

She was also the beloved grandmother of Isabelle and Jackson, who knew her as Nano. Being Nano gave Dotty another generation to love, teach, feed, spoil, and creatively encourage.

Her cancer took her life. It did not take her courage, her intellect, her humor, her curiosity, or the work she left behind. It did not take the sons she raised, the grandchildren she loved, the people she mentored, the traditions she carried across borders, or the words she put into the world.

Those remain.