About Marie Howe
Marie Howe is an American poet, journalist, academic and director of collections. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Poet Laureate of the State of New York. In 2015 she was received as a member of the Academy of American Poets, she will be elected Chancellor in 2018. In 1988, Marie Howe published her first collection of poetry, The Good Thief, an exploration of human relationships, attachment, loss and transcendence in interpersonal relationships. This book was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. In 1989, she was selected by Stanley Kunitz to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 1997 Howe published her second collection of poetry, What the Living Do, an elegy in the memory of her brother John, who died of AIDS in 1989, where she abandoned metaphor and other poetic forms to become, a documentary on loss. She also edited an anthology 'In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AlDS Pandemic' with Michael Klein, published by Persea Books.In 2009, she published her third collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, which is a meditation on ordinary yet miraculous moments, like rushing through errands, witnessing a dying mother, and helping a child on the playground. The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her most recent volume of poetry Magdalene published in 2017, was long-listed for the National Book Award. Her poems are widely and regularly published in various magazines and journals including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry, Ploughshares and Tikkun.
Marie Howe has taught at various universities, Tufts University, Dartmouth College, New York University and Sarah Lawrence College. She resides in New York's West Village with her daughter Grace Yi-Nan Howe, whom she adopted from China in 2003.
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Poetry saved my life-growing up and finding poems that reflected back to me psychological and emotional states that I was confronting. It’s an art that addresses the truth that we are living and dying at the same time. What could be stranger than that?
