Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe (born October 15, 1940 in Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose.

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 The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.

Her writing career began during the 1960s with a series of paperback original novels she published under the pseudonym Della Field.

Known as "Sweet Nurse'" books, each book featured Vietnam nurses as well as women in WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and the WACS (Women's Army Corps).

"Fanny Howe isn't part of the local literary canon. But her seven novels about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and '70s."

She attended Stanford University for three years, and in 1961—the year she left Stanford—she married Frederick Delafield, whom she divorced two years later.

Her aunt was Helen Howe, a monologuist and novelist.

As a Civil Rights activist, she met and married the activist Carl Senna in the 1970s, who is of African-Mexican descent and is also a poet and writer.

They are the parents of the novelist Danzy Senna, who writes about growing up biracial in the 1970s and 80s in her novel Caucasia.

Howe and Senna also had two other children, Lucien Quincy Senna, and Maceo Senna.

Howe is one of the most widely read of American experimental poets.

In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the Most Outstanding Book of Poetry Published in 2000 from the Academy of American Poets and she was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize

She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.

She is professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Howe was born in Buffalo, New York.

When her father Mark De Wolfe Howe left to join the fighting in World War II, Howe and her mother, the Irish playwright Mary Manning, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she grew up.

Her father eventually became a colonel and served in Sicily and North Africa and then after the war he went to Potsdam to give legal advice in the reorganization of Europe.

After the war, her father continued his work as a lawyer and became a professor at Harvard Law School.

Howe's mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin for some time.

Her sister is Susan Howe, who also became a poet.

Howe's Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Some of her essays have been collected, including The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003)

Poet Michael Palmer:

Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate,

spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit.

Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the "city on a hill".

Writes Emerson, The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof.

Joshua Glenn:

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).

Her poem "Catholic" was selected by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 volume of The Best American Poetry.

Howe has continued to publish novels throughout her career, including Lives of the Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005).

She has also continued to publish in the essay form.

On the Ground was on the international shortlist for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize.

She was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation.

She is also the recipient of the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California

Howe received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She was a judge for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize.

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