Fanny Howe
Fanny Howe (October 15, 1940 – July 9, 2025) was an American poet, novelist, essayist, and professor emerita whose career spanned over six decades and produced more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.[1][2] Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an intellectual family—her father was the legal scholar Mark DeWolfe Howe and her mother the Irish playwright Mary Manning—Howe studied at Stanford University before pursuing a peripatetic path that included teaching at institutions such as Tufts University and the University of California, San Diego.[1][3] Her writing, characterized by experimental forms and meditations on faith, doubt, migration, and social inequities, often intertwined personal experience with broader philosophical inquiries, reflecting her conversion to Catholicism and engagement with radical traditions.[2][4] Howe's notable achievements include the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, recognizing her contributions to American poetry, as well as the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems.[2][1] She received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005.[2][3] Key works encompass poetry collections such as Second Childhood (2014), Come and See (2011), and Gone (2003); novels including Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and essays like those in The Wedding Dress.[2][4] Howe's influence extended through her teaching and archival presence, with her notebooks held at Harvard University and papers at Stanford, underscoring her role in shaping contemporary poetics amid institutional literary circles.[5][2]Early Life and Education
Family Background and Childhood
Fanny Howe was born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, during a lunar eclipse, as the middle child of three daughters born to Mark DeWolfe Howe and Mary Manning Howe.[6][7] Her father, a Harvard Law School professor and legal historian descended from the Boston Quincy family, specialized in constitutional law, authored biographies of figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and publicly opposed McCarthyism while advocating for civil rights.[6][7] Her mother, born in Dublin in 1906 to a Quaker family with radical leanings, grew up amid Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising events, pursued acting and playwriting, and later founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fostering connections with Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey.[8][1][6] The family soon relocated to Cambridge after her father's World War II service, settling into a permissive household on Highland Street amid a shabby, émigré-influenced neighborhood.[8][6] Howe's early years were marked by her father's wartime absence—her earliest memory being him in uniform saying goodbye—and a literary atmosphere shaped by her mother's theatrical pursuits, including acting in family plays and hosting avant-garde rehearsals like those for Ionesco productions in their living room when Howe was about ten.[7][8] At age six, a trip to Ireland revealed her mother's multifaceted Irish roots, prompting Howe to reflect, "The big shock was finding out that our mother had all these parts to her."[6] She roamed Cambridge's gardens and parks freely, fostering a deep affinity for animals and nature over formal studies, where she struggled as a student, while drawing political awareness from her father's activism, such as attending Malcolm X's Harvard appearance together.[6][8] Influenced by this intellectual milieu, Howe began writing short stories and her first poem around ages eight or nine, encouraged by her father, amid exposures to folk music, Beatnik culture, books, films, and experimental theater during her Cambridge high school years.[6][7] Her sisters included the elder Susan Howe, a noted poet, and the younger Helen Howe Braider, a sculptor and painter, reflecting the family's artistic inclinations.[6]Formal Education and Early Interests
Fanny Howe enrolled at Stanford University in 1957 at the age of seventeen, where she studied Russian literature and history.[9] She attended the university for three years but did not complete a degree, having dropped out multiple times amid personal and academic challenges.[9] During her time there, Howe took classes with the literary critic Malcolm Cowley, though she later recalled his frequent inattention during lectures.[9] Howe's early interests centered on literature and nature, shaped by her family's intellectual environment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her mother was a playwright and her father a Harvard legal historian.[6] As a child, she composed her first poem around age eight or nine, focusing on observations of the natural world and its broader implications.[6] By age fourteen, she wrote another poem but ceased sharing her work publicly for some years.[6] She developed an affinity for poetry through readings of E. E. Cummings and enjoyed books featuring animals and mysteries, such as those by Beatrix Potter.[6] In high school, Howe's interests extended to the Beat generation poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, alongside folk music, reflecting a youthful engagement with countercultural expressions.[6] She also encountered prominent literary figures early, such as meeting Samuel Beckett in Paris during her senior year.[9] These pursuits, combined with outdoor activities like climbing trees and observing insects, underscored her precocious draw toward creative and observational modes of expression, though she described herself as a poor student in local Cambridge schools.[6]Personal Life
Marriage and Family Relationships
Fanny Howe had two marriages. Her first marriage was to Frederick Delafield in California, which lasted two years and ended in divorce in 1963.[10] In 1967, Howe met Carl Senna, a Black and Mexican-American writer, poet, editor, and civil rights activist, through shared involvement in activism; they married in 1968, shortly after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.[10][7][11] Their interracial union carried symbolic weight amid the era's racial tensions, representing both personal commitment and broader hopes for integration, though it later proved tumultuous, straining relationships with friends and family over seven years.[11][12][13] The couple had three children in quick succession between 1969 and 1972: Lucien Senna, Danzy Senna (a novelist), and Abel Senna.[6][14] Following their separation in the mid-1970s and subsequent divorce, Howe raised the children as a single mother in Boston, an experience that influenced works such as the poetry collections Poem from a Single Pallet (1980) and Robeson Street (1985).[6][15] The family's mixed-race dynamics and post-divorce challenges, including navigating racial identity in a divided society, recur in Howe's writing and her daughter Danzy Senna's memoirs.[15][11]Religious Conversion and Social Engagement
Fanny Howe converted to Catholicism in 1982 at the age of 42, influenced by the philosopher Simone Weil and regular attendance at Mass.[16][13] She later characterized the process as akin to a marriage, emphasizing habit, perseverance, and immersion in ritual amid personal hardship.[17] Her faith drew from mystical traditions and liberation theology, which aligns Catholic doctrine with Marxist-inspired activism for the marginalized, reflecting her view of religion as a call to radical social praxis rather than institutional conformity.[15][18] Howe's Catholicism intertwined with her literary output, as seen in poems exploring doubt, redemption, and divine encounter, such as the long prose poem "Catholic" from the 1990s and collections like Gone (2003) and Love and I (2019).[6][19] She expressed reservations about certain Church teachings, framing her belief as a "heresy" of personal interpretation that prioritized empathy, contingency, and opposition to bourgeois complacency.[19] This spiritual framework informed her critique of systemic injustice, viewing faith not as doctrinal orthodoxy but as a mystical engagement with suffering and the world's "wildness."[20] Socially, Howe sustained activism rooted in the civil rights era, including efforts for school integration in Boston during the 1970s busing crisis, continuing her father's legacy as a civil rights lawyer who challenged segregation and McCarthyism.[9][21] In her thirties, amid personal difficulties, she reported peak commitment to social justice, channeling this into writing that fused political critique with poetic fragmentation to evoke collective struggle.[14] Her engagement persisted through the 1960s and 1970s movements, emphasizing anti-bourgeois rebellion against her privileged upbringing and alignment with liberation theology's preferential option for the poor.[22][23] This blend of faith and action underscored her oeuvre's focus on justice without resolving into ideological certainty.[24]Professional Career
Academic Roles and Teaching
Howe commenced her academic career teaching creative writing in the Boston area for nearly two decades, holding positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and other institutions.[2][3] In 1989, she joined the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) as a tenured professor of writing and literature, where she focused on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction workshops.[5] She remained at UCSD for over a decade, retiring in 2000 and subsequently holding the title of professor emerita.[10][25] Throughout her tenure, Howe's teaching emphasized experimental forms and interdisciplinary approaches, drawing from her own oeuvre in poetry and prose to guide students in exploring spiritual, social, and narrative disruptions.[26] She also served in visiting capacities, including as the Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis in 2001 and the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in spring 2005.[23][26] Additional lecturing roles included the University of Massachusetts and Kenyon College residencies, extending her influence on emerging writers.[9]Writing Milestones and Publications
Fanny Howe's publishing career began with her debut poetry collection, Eggs, issued in 1970 by Houghton Mifflin.[6] Over five decades, she authored more than twenty books across poetry, novels, essays, short stories, and young adult literature, often exploring intersections of spirituality, social justice, and personal narrative.[1] Her prose works include novels such as The Deep North (Sun & Moon Press, 1990), Nod (Sun & Moon Press, 1998), and Indivisible (Semiotext(e), 2001), the latter part of a series reissued in 2020 as Radical Love: Five Novels encompassing Saving History, Famous Questions, and others originally published between 1985 and 2001.[1] [27] Significant milestones mark her recognition in literary circles. In 2000, the University of California Press released Selected Poems, which earned the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.[2] This volume also placed her on the shortlist for the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize, followed by another shortlist in 2005 for On the Ground (Graywolf Press, 2004).[2] Howe received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009 from the Poetry Foundation, acknowledging lifetime contributions to American poetry.[1] Additional honors include a 2008 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, alongside grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Bunting Institute and MacDowell Colony.[2] Her poetry output features innovative collections like Gone (University of California Press, 2003), One Crossed Out (Graywolf Press, 1997), The End (1992), and later volumes such as Come and See (Graywolf Press, 2011), Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014; National Book Award finalist), The Needle’s Eye (2016), Love and I (2019), and Manimal Woe (2021).[2] Essay collections include The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003) and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (Graywolf Press, 2009).[1] Posthumously, her novel Holy Smoke is scheduled for release in December 2025 by Divided Publishing.[28]Literary Works
Poetry Collections
Fanny Howe's debut poetry collection, Eggs, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1970.[9] She released nine additional collections by 1990, establishing her voice in experimental and spiritual poetry through small presses.[9] In the 1990s and beyond, Howe produced over a dozen further volumes, frequently with Graywolf Press and University of California Press, totaling more than twenty poetry books overall.[2] Key collections from this later period include:- The End (1992)[2]
- O’Clock (Reality Street, 1995)[1]
- One Crossed Out (Graywolf Press, 1997)[29]
- Q (1998)[2]
- Forged (Post-Apollo Press, 1999)[1]
- Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2000), which received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize[2][30]
- Gone (University of California Press, 2003)[2]
- On the Ground (Graywolf Press, 2004)[2]
- The Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2007)[31]
- Come and See (Graywolf Press, 2011)
- Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award[2][24]
- Love and I (Graywolf Press, 2019)[32]
- Manimal Woe (2021)[2]