Fanny Howe

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 such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and previously lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she taught at MIT, Tufts University, and other institutions for nearly 20 years.

• Name — Fanny Howe • Birth Name — Fanny Quincy Howe • Born — 15 October 1940 • Birthplace — Buffalo, New York, U.S. • Died — 8 July 2025 • Place of death — Lincoln, Massachusetts, U.S. • Occupation — * Poet • novelist • short story writer • Children — 3 (including Danzy Senna) • Relatives — Mary Manning, Susan Howe, and R. H. Quaytman • Awards — 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize • Illustration — Howe in Speaking Portraits, c. 2003

Howe was born in Buffalo, New York on October 15, 1940. Her father Mark DeWolfe Howe (son of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe) was then teaching at the state university law school. When her father left to join the fighting in World War II, her mother, Irish playwright Mary Manning, took Howe and her older sister Susan Howe to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Their younger sister Helen was born after their father's return from the war.) There the family lived through the children's childhoods. Later in life, Fanny did not identify with her father's cultural background of the so-called Boston Brahmins, though she admired him personally. Her father became a colonel and served in Sicily and North Africa. After the war he went to Potsdam as a legal adviser in the Allies' reorganization of Europe. Returning to peacetime, her father continued his work as a lawyer and became a professor at Harvard Law School. Howe's mother had been an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for some time before coming to the United States in 1935. She also wrote several plays performed there and at the Gate Theatre. Her maternal aunt was Helen Howe, a monologuist and novelist. Her sisters are the poet Susan Howe and Helen Howe. Fanny Howe attended Stanford University for three years. She was briefly attracted by the political activism, and communism. In 1961—the year she left Stanford—she married Frederick Delafield, a microbiologist. They had no children and divorced two years later. As a civil rights activist, she met fellow activist Carl Senna; they married in 1968. (Their daughter Danzy Senna recalled: "I remember my mother went to the courthouse to get some paperwork for the marriage and in Boston, where interracial couples hadn't been illegal at that time... [and] the woman said to her, "Wait, I have to go in the back and see if this is legal that you two are getting married.") They also shared literary interests but had increasing personal conflicts. They had three children in four years: two daughters and a son. Their middle child is novelist Danzy Senna. After Howe and Senna split up, Howe went on welfare for a period.

• Illustration — Howe in 2008 She published two paperback original "pulp" novels under the pseudonym Della Field during the 1960s. Known as "Nurse Novels," one book featured a nurse in the Vietnam War while the other was about a nurse living in San Francisco. These were not typical of her later works in poetry and prose. Some of her novels came close to her poetry in using experimental techniques and an abbreviated language. Howe had long studied the writings of Edith Stein and Simone Weil, and sometimes pursued questions similar to theirs. She converted to Catholicism at the age of 40. As Zack Schlosberg writes in Cleveland Review of Books, "Suffering and seeking are two major subjects of Howe's fiction...", which he also found in her novel London-rose, written in the 1990s but not published until 2022. Howe continued to publish novels and essays throughout her career. Howe taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University.

Howe died at a hospice in Lincoln, Massachusetts, after a brief illness, on July 8, 2025, at the age of 84. Poet Christian Wiman wrote, "I can't overstate how important a presence [Fanny Howe] has been in my life, though we've probably spent a total of fifty hours together."

• Eggs: poems, Houghton Mifflin, 1970 • The Amerindian Coastline Poem, Telephone Books Press, 1975, • Poem from a Single Pallet, Kelsey Street Press, 1980, • Alsace-Lorraine, Telephone Books Press, 1982, • For Erato: The Meaning of Life, 1984 • Robeson Street, Alice James Books, 1985, • Introduction to the World, Figures, 1986, • The Lives of a Spirit, Sun & Moon Press, 1987, • The Vineyard, Lost Roads Publishers, 1988, • [sic], Parentheses Writing Series, October 1988, • The End, Littoral Books, 1992 • The Quietist, O Books, 1992, • O'Clock, Reality Street, 1995, • One Crossed Out, Graywolf Press, 1997, • Forged, Post-Apollo Press, 1999, • A Folio for Fanny Howe, Spectacular Diseases, 1999 (includes the long poem "Q") • Selected Poems, University of California Press, 2000, (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize) • Gone, University of California Press, 2003 • Tis of Thee, Atelos, 2003, • On the Ground, Graywolf Press, 2004, (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize) • The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken Nightboat Books, 2005, • Tramp, Vallum, 2005 • The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007, • (with Henia Karmel-Wolfe and Ilona Karmel) A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond, University of California Press, 2007, • Emergence, Reality Street, 2010, • Outremer, Poetry Magazine, September 2011, • Come and See: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2011, * • Love and I: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2019, • Manimal Woe, Arrowsmith Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1734641653 • This Poor Book, Graywolf Press, 2026,

• West Coast Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1963; Nurse Novels Publishing (republished in 2024) • Vietnam Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1966 • Forty Whacks, Houghton Mifflin, 1969, • First Marriage HarperCollins, 1974, • Bronte Wilde, Avon Books, 1976, (revised and republished in 2020 by Grand Iota) * • The White Slave, Avon Books, 1980, (revised and republished as The Wages in 2018) * • The Deep North, Sun & Moon Press, 1988, • Famous Questions, Ballantine Books, 1989, • Saving History, Sun & Moon Press, 1993, • Nod, Sun & Moon Press, 1998, • Indivisible, Semiotext(e), 2000, (republished in 2022, with foreword by Eugene Lim) • Economics: Stories, Flood Editions, 2002, • Radical Love: 5 Novels, Nightboat Books, 2006, • The Wages, Pressed Wafer, 2018, (reissued in 2020 by Grid Books) • Night Philosophy, Divided Publishing, 2020, • London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World, Divided Publishing, 2022,

• The Blue Hills, Avon, 1981, • Yeah, But Avon/Flare, August 1982, • Radio City Avon/Flare book, 1984, • Taking Care, Avon Books, 1985, • Race of the Radical, Viking Kestrel, 1985, • What Did I Do Wrong?, Illustrator Colleen McCallion, Flood Editions, 2009,

* • The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press, 2009, • The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth, Graywolf Press, 2016,