Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe in 2012
Fanny Howe in 2012
BornFanny Quincy Howe
(1940-10-15)October 15, 1940
Buffalo, New York, U.S.
DiedJuly 9, 2025(2025-07-09) (aged 84)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation
  • Poet
  • novelist
  • short story writer
Notable awards2005 Griffin Poetry Prize; 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Children3 (including Danzy Senna )
RelativesMary Manning, Susan Howe, and R. H. Quaytman
Howe in Speaking Portraits, circa 2003

Fanny Howe (October 15, 1940 – July 9, 2025) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1][2] Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose.[3] Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.[3]

Howe has received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize[4] by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California.[5] In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize.[6] She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life, education and marriage

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Howe was born in Buffalo, New York. Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe was then teaching at the state university law school. When her father left to join the fighting in World War II, her mother, Irish playwright Mary Manning, took Howe and her older sister Susan Howe to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Their younger sister Helen was born after their father's return from the war.) There the family lived through the children's childhoods.[7]

Her father became a colonel and served in Sicily and North Africa. After the war he went to Potsdam as a legal adviser in the Allies' reorganization of Europe.[8] Returning to peacetime, her father continued his work as a lawyer and became a professor at Harvard Law School.[9]

Howe's mother had been an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for some time before coming to the United States in 1935. She also wrote several plays performed there and at the Gate Theatre.[8] Her maternal aunt was Helen Howe, a monologuist and novelist. Her sisters are the poet Susan Howe and Helen Howe.

Fanny Howe attended Stanford University for three years. She was briefly attracted by the political activism, and communism. In 1961—the year she left Stanford—she married Frederick Delafield. They had no children and divorced two years later.[10]

As a civil rights activist in the 1970s, she met and married in 1968 fellow activist Carl Senna. (Danzy Senna recalled: "I remember my mother went to the courthouse to get some paperwork for the marriage and in Boston, where interracial couples hadn't been illegal at that time ... [and] the woman said to her, "Wait, I have to go in the back and see if this is legal that you two are getting married."[11]) They shared literary interests. They had three children in four years.[citation needed]

Writing career

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Howe in 2008

She published two paperback original "pulp" novels under the pseudonym Della Field during the 1960s.[8] Known as "Nurse Novels," one book featured a nurse in the Vietnam War while the other was about a nurse living in San Francisco.[12]

These were not typical of her later works in poetry and prose. Some of her novels came close to her poetry in using experimental techniques and an abbreviated language. Howe had long studied the writings of Edith Stein and Simone Weil, and sometimes pursued questions similar to theirs.

She converted to Catholicism at the age of 40.[13]

As Zack Schlosberg writes in Cleveland Review of Books, "Suffering and seeking are two major subjects of Howe's fiction...", which he also found in her novel London-rose, written in the 1990s but not published until 2022.[13]

Howe continued to publish novels and essays throughout her career.[14]

Howe taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University.[15]

Reception

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Poet Michael Palmer finds that "Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit."[15]

In 2004, Joshua Glenn of The Boston Globe wrote that Fanny Howe "isn't part of the local literary canon," but that her novels offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and '70s.[16] Howe's prose poems, "Everything's a Fake" and "Doubt", were selected by David Lehman for the anthology Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present (2003).[17] Her poem "Catholic" was selected by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 volume of The Best American Poetry.[18] Howe's Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. On the Ground was on the international shortlist for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. Howe received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.[4]

Publications

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Poetry

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  • Eggs: poems, Houghton Mifflin, 1970
  • The Amerindian Coastline Poem, Telephone Books Press, 1975, ISBN 0-916382-08-7
  • Poem from a Single Pallet, Kelsey Street Press, 1980, ISBN 0-932716-10-5
  • Alsace-Lorraine, Telephone Books Press, 1982, ISBN 0-916382-28-1
  • For Erato: The Meaning of Life, 1984
  • Robeson Street, Alice James Books, 1985, ISBN 978-0-914086-59-8
  • Introduction to the World, Figures, 1986, ISBN 0-935724-21-4
  • The Lives of a Spirit, Sun & Moon Press, 1987, ISBN 0-940650-95-9
  • The Vineyard, Lost Roads Publishers, 1988, ISBN 978-0-918786-37-1
  • [sic], Parentheses Writing Series, October 1988, ISBN 978-0-9620862-2-9
  • The End, Littoral Books, 1992 ISBN 1-55713-145-7
  • The Quietist, O Books, 1992, ISBN 978-1-882022-12-0
  • O'Clock, Reality Street, 1995, ISBN 978-1-874400-07-3
  • One Crossed Out, Graywolf Press, 1997, ISBN 978-1-55597-259-2
  • Forged, Post-Apollo Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-942996-36-4
  • Selected Poems, University of California Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-520-22263-2 (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Gone, University of California Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0-520-23810-7
  • Tis of Thee, Atelos, 2003, ISBN 978-1-891190-16-2
  • On the Ground, Graywolf Press, 2004, ISBN 978-1-55597-403-9 (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken Nightboat Books, 2005, ISBN 978-0-9767185-1-2
  • The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-55597-472-5
  • (with Henia Karmel-Wolfe and Ilona Karmel) A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond, University of California Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-520-25136-6
  • Outremer, Poetry Magazine, September 2011, ISSN 0032-2032
  • Come and See: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-55597-586-9
  • Second Childhood: Poems. Graywolf Press. November 18, 2014. pp. 29–. ISBN 978-1-55597-917-1.[19]
  • Love and I: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-64445-004-8
  • Manimal Woe, Arrowsmith Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1734641653[20]

Fiction

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Young adult fiction

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Essays

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Reviews

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References

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  1. ^ Zimmer, Melanie (2008). "Fanny Quincy Howe". In Byrne, James Patrick; Coleman, Philip; King, Jason Francis (eds.). Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History : A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, Volume 2. ABC-CLIO. pp. 427–430. ISBN 978-1-85109-614-5.
  2. ^ "2005 Shortlist - Fanny Howe". The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  3. ^ a b Foundation, Poetry (July 13, 2022). "Fanny Howe". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
  4. ^ a b "Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko Receive Major Literary Awards from Poetry Foundation". The Poetry Foundation. April 14, 2009. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  5. ^ "Fanny Howe". National Book Foundation.
  6. ^ "Fanny Howe". thebookerprizes.com. Retrieved July 9, 2025.
  7. ^ "Fanny Howe". The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  8. ^ a b c "Fanny Howe on Race, Family, and the Line Between Fiction and Poetry - Literary Hub". November 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2016.
  9. ^ "Mark De Wolfe Howe Dies; Lawyer, Historian Was 60". The Harvard Crimson. March 1, 1967. Retrieved July 9, 2025.
  10. ^ "Fanny (Quincy) Howe". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved June 14, 2012.
  11. ^ Gross, Terry (September 3, 2024). "'I want to write myself into existence,' says 'Colored Television' author". NPR. Retrieved July 9, 2025.
  12. ^ Duncan, Fiona Alison (October 2020). "Interview with Fanny Howe". The White Review. No. 29. Retrieved February 21, 2023.
  13. ^ a b Schlosberg, Zack (December 8, 2023). "Out of the Seeming Blue: On Fanny Howe's London-rose". Cleveland Review of Books. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  14. ^ Garcia Roberts, Chloe (2025). "The Art of Poetry No. 118". The Paris Review (252): 135. Howe's immense body of work–twenty-five books of poetry, twelve novels, two pulp romances, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, one book of prose rearranged from books past, six works of young adult fiction, and six short films–is [...] a sort of existential wilderness.
  15. ^ a b "Fanny Howe". The Academy of American Poets. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  16. ^ Glenn, Joshua (March 7, 2004). "Bewildered in Boston". The Boston Globe.Subscription required.
  17. ^ Lehman, David, ed. (2003). "Fanny Howe". Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-2989-0.
  18. ^ Hejinian, Lyn; Lehman, David, eds. (2004). "Catholic". The Best American Poetry 2004. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-5757-2.
  19. ^ Treseler, Heather (October 20, 2015). "Little Gods". Boston Review. Retrieved October 20, 2015. Howe transfigures our quicksilver hungers and contemporary condition into an art true to "the secular rule of life." If Howe's voice is that of the escaping nymph managing our shipwreck, we might not be safer than in her tote, finding our hope in the empathy that is imagining.
  20. ^ "Books". ARROWSMITH. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
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