Ben E. Watkins

Fanny Howe is the author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose. “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 explained in a 2004 interview with the Kenyon Review. Indeed, more than a subject or theme, the process of recording experience is central to Howe’s poetry. Her work explores grammatical possibilities, and its rhythms are generated from associative images and sounds.

Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). Critic Jordan Davis lauds the manner in which revelatory thought is presented in Gone: “Howe enacts what the South American poet Jorge Guinheime called hasosismo, or the art of the fallen limb, in which startling insights emerge and are subsequently concealed.” Critic Kimberley Lamm, discussing the poem “Doubt,” writes, “Fanny Howe’s work is unique in contemporary poetry for its exploration of religious faith, ethics, politics, and suffering.”

Her Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She has received 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 MacDowell Colony. In 2001 and 2005, Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2008 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is also the author of several novels and prose collections, most recently The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and Nod (1998). She has written short stories, books for young adults, and the collection of literary essays The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003).

Howe grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught for almost 20 years in Boston, at MIT, Tufts University, and elsewhere, before taking a job at the University of California at San Diego. She lives in Massachusetts. In 2012 she was the inaugural visiting writer in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.