Fanny Howe

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Fanny Howe (1940 - ) is an American poet, novelist and short story writer.

She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father was a lawyer and her mother, Mary Manning, was born in Dublin and wrote plays and acted for the Abbey Theatre before moving to the United States. Her sister is the poet, Susan Howe and her daughter is the novelist, Danzy Senna^[1]

Howe is one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. Her books include: Selected Poems (2000) (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), The End (1992), and On the Ground (2004) (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize). 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.

Of her work, fellow poet Michael Palmer comments:

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.

She is currently Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

[edit] Notes

^ Bewildered in Boston by Joshua Glenn the subtitle of this article (which appeared March 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe) reads: 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.

[edit] External links

Biography
Fanny Howe Papers
Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio and video clips
Interview with Kenyon Review
Fanny Howe page at Ploughshares includes links to Howe's contributions to Ploughshares that began in 1972 with an excerpt from an early novel. Since then she has been a consistent contibutor of poems, essays, and non-fiction. Howe was the guest-editor for an edition of Ploughshares in 1974, and has contributed to this journal as recently as 2004.
Bewilderment a talk by Fanny Howe, with an excerpt here from a longer version presented 9/25/98 on the Poetics & Readings Series, sponsored by Small Press Traffic at New College, San Francisco.