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Fanny Howe

"This complexly articulate writer uses poetry as a final resource. All the authority of her power becomes explicit in her poems, the musing, twisting thoughts and persons woven into a meld of great force and beauty. This is life if it could speak. Here it does."

- Robert Creeley

Fanny Howe is a poet, novelist and short-story writer. In the course of a long, literary career she has published twenty books and has been the recipient of several awards including the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005 and and in 2009, was the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a prize which is presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living US poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University and Massachusessts Institute of Technology. She is currently a Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego and Visiting Chair at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University Fanny Howe is the mother of novelist Danzy Senna and sister of Susan Howe, who is also a poet. Her father was a lawyer and her Irish-born mother played in the Abbey Theatre of Dublin for some time.

Howe has become (arguably) one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (Graywolf, 2004). A new collection, Come and See is due out in Spring 2011.

She has also published several volumes of prose, including Lives of the Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003), a collection of essays.

"If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle."

- Fanny Howe in interview.

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