Login
Login

Fanny Howe

{{Short description|American poet and novelist (born 1940)}}

{{use mdy dates|date=November 2024}}

{{External links|date=March 2022}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Fanny Howe

| image = Fanny_Howe_-_August_23,_2012 (cropped).jpg

| imagesize =

| caption = Fanny Howe in 2012

| pseudonym =

| birth_name = Fanny Quincy Howe

| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1940|10|15}}

| birth_place = Buffalo, New York, U.S.

| death_date =

| death_place =

| occupation = {{flatlist|

  • Poet
  • novelist
  • short story writer

}}

| period =

| genre =

| subject =

| movement =

| notableworks =

| spouse =

| partner =

| children = 3 (including Danzy Senna )

| relatives = Mary Manning, Susan Howe, and R. H. Quaytman

| influences =

| influenced =

| awards = 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize; 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

| signature =

| website =

| portaldisp =

}}

File:Fanny Howe in Speaking Portraits c.2003.jpg

Fanny Howe (born October 15, 1940, in Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.{{cite book |title=Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History : A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, Volume 2 |chapter=Fanny Quincy Howe |pages=427–430 |last=Zimmer |first=Melanie |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=agfvVQnBu9MC&pg=PA427 |editor1-last=Byrne |editor1-first=James Patrick |editor2-last=Coleman |editor2-first=Philip |editor3-first=Jason Francis |editor3-last=King |publisher=ABC-CLIO |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-85109-614-5}}{{cite web |url=http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/awards-and-poets/shortlists/2005-shortlist/fanny-howe/ |title=2005 Shortlist - Fanny Howe |access-date=2011-06-27 |publisher=The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry}} Howe has written more than 20 books of poetry and prose.{{Cite web |last=Foundation |first=Poetry |date=2022-07-13 |title=Fanny Howe |url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fanny-howe |access-date=2022-07-14 |website=Poetry Foundation |language=en}} 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 has received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize{{cite web |date=April 14, 2009 |title=Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko Receive Major Literary Awards from Poetry Foundation |url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/announcement/041409 |access-date=2011-06-27 |publisher=The Poetry Foundation}} by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California.{{cite web | url=https://www.nationalbook.org/people/fanny-howe/ | title=Fanny Howe|publisher=National Book Foundation }} 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.[https://thebookerprizes.com/node/4394/ "Fanny Howe"], The Booker Prizes. She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She is professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Early life, education and marriage

Howe was born in Buffalo, New York. Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe was then teaching at the state university law school. When her father Mark De Wolfe Howe 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.{{cite web |url=http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/fanny-howe |title=Fanny Howe |publisher=The Poetry Foundation |access-date=2011-06-27}}

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.{{cite web|url=http://lithub.com/fanny-howe-on-race-family-and-the-line-between-fiction-and-poetry/|title=Fanny Howe on Race, Family, and the Line Between Fiction and Poetry - Literary Hub|date=November 2016 |access-date=3 November 2016}} Returning to peacetime, 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, before coming to the United States in 1935. She also wrote several plays to be performed there and at the Gate Theatre. Her maternal aunt was Helen Howe, a monologuist and novelist. Her sisters are Susan Howe, who also became a notable poet, and Helen Howe.

Later recalling her early ambitions to be a poet, 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. They had no children and divorced two years later.{{cite web |url=http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3401600343/howe-fanny-quincy.html |title=Fanny (Quincy) Howe |publisher=encyclopedia.com |access-date=2012-06-14}}

As a civil rights activist in the 1970s, she met and married in 1968https://www.npr.org/2024/09/03/nx-s1-5095921/colored-television-danzy-senna fellow activist Carl Senna. (Danzy Senna: "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."https://www.npr.org/2024/09/03/nx-s1-5095921/colored-television-danzy-senna) They also shared the literary world. Of African-American-Mexican descent, he is also a poet and was one of the youngest editors of a notable journal.

They had three children in four years. Their middle child, Danzy Senna, became a novelist and essayist. She draws from her biracial family and her experience, exploring issues of race and class in the US. Howe and Senna separated when the children were young, and had a bitter divorce.

Writing career

File:Fanny Howe in 2008.jpg

Howe is one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. Her writing career began during the 1960s with two paperback original "pulp" novels, published under the pseudonym Della Field. Known as "Nurse Novels", one book featured a nurse in the Vietnam War while the other was about a nurse living in San Francisco.{{Cite magazine |title=Interview with Fanny Howe |url=https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-fanny-howe/ |access-date=2023-02-21 |magazine=The White Review|issue= 29|date=October 2020 |first=Fiona Alison|last=Duncan|language=en-US}}

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 pursues questions similar to theirs. She converted to Catholicism at the age of 40.{{cite web|url=https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/fanny-howe-london-rose |title=Out of the Seeming Blue: On Fanny Howe's London-rose|last=Schlosberg |first=Zack|work=Cleveland Review of Books| date=8 Dec 2023|access-date=8 Oct 2024}}

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

Poet Michael Palmer says:

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". As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty." Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof.{{cite web |title=Fanny Howe |url=http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/881 |access-date=2011-06-27 |publisher=The Academy of American Poets}}

Joshua Glenn in The Boston Globe wrote:

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.{{cite news| url=http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/03/07/bewildered_in_boston/ |title=Bewildered in Boston |work=The Boston Globe |first= Joshua |last=Glenn |date=March 7, 2004}}Subscription required.

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).{{cite book |title=Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to the Present |editor1-last=Lehman |editor1-first=David |year=2003 |chapter=Fanny Howe |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-0-7432-2989-0 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RzunYckU4woC&pg=PA135 }} Her poem "Catholic" was selected by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 volume of The Best American Poetry.{{cite book| chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=58J6YcsJuloC&pg=PA110 |chapter=Catholic |title=The Best American Poetry 2004| editor1-last=Hejinian |editor1-first=Lyn |editor1-link=Lyn Hejinian |editor2-first=David |editor2-last=Lehman | publisher= Simon and Schuster| year= 2004|isbn= 978-0-7432-5757-2 }}

Howe's Selected Poems won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. On the Ground was on the international shortlist for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. 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.

Publications

=Poetry=

  • Eggs: poems, Houghton Mifflin, 1970
  • The Amerindian Coastline Poem, Telephone Books Press, 1975, {{ISBN|0-916382-08-7}}
  • Poem from a Single Pallet, Kelsey Street Press, 1980, {{ISBN|0-932716-10-5}}
  • Alsace-Lorraine, Telephone Books Press, 1982, {{ISBN|0-916382-28-1}}
  • For Erato: The Meaning of Life, 1984
  • Robeson Street, Alice James Books, 1985, {{ISBN|978-0-914086-59-8}}
  • Introduction to the World, Figures, 1986, {{ISBN|0-935724-21-4}}
  • The Lives of a Spirit, Sun & Moon Press, 1987, {{ISBN|0-940650-95-9}}
  • The Vineyard, Lost Roads Publishers, 1988, {{ISBN|978-0-918786-37-1}}
  • [sic], Parentheses Writing Series, October 1988, {{ISBN|978-0-9620862-2-9}}
  • The End, Littoral Books, 1992 {{ISBN|1-55713-145-7}}
  • The Quietist, O Books, 1992, {{ISBN|978-1-882022-12-0}}
  • O'Clock, Reality Street, 1995, {{ISBN|978-1-874400-07-3}}
  • One Crossed Out, Graywolf Press, 1997, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-259-2}}
  • Forged, Post-Apollo Press, 1999, {{ISBN|978-0-942996-36-4}}
  • Selected Poems, University of California Press, 2000, {{ISBN|978-0-520-22263-2}} (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Gone, University of California Press, 2003 {{ISBN|978-0-520-23810-7}}
  • Tis of Thee, Atelos, 2003, {{ISBN|978-1-891190-16-2}}
  • On the Ground, Graywolf Press, 2004, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-403-9}} (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken Nightboat Books, 2005, {{ISBN|978-0-9767185-1-2}}
  • The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-472-5}}
  • (with Henia Karmel-Wolfe and Ilona Karmel) [https://books.google.com/books?id=e80JLqFurgYC A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond], University of California Press, 2007, {{ISBN|978-0-520-25136-6}}
  • Outremer, Poetry Magazine, September 2011, {{ISSN|0032-2032}}
  • Come and See: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2011, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-586-9}}
  • {{cite book| title=Second Childhood: Poems|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YYQkBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT29|date=18 November 2014|publisher=Graywolf Press|isbn=978-1-55597-917-1|pages=29–}}{{Cite web|title = Little Gods|url = https://bostonreview.net/poetry/heather-treseler-fanny-howe-second-childhood|website = Boston Review|access-date = 2015-10-20|quote = Howe transfigures our quicksilver hungers and contemporary condition into an art true to "the secular rule of life." If Howe's voice is that of the escaping nymph managing our shipwreck, we might not be safer than in her tote, finding our hope in the empathy that is imagining.|date = October 20, 2015|last = Treseler|first = Heather}}
  • Love and I: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2019, {{ISBN|978-1-64445-004-8}}
  • Manimal Woe, Arrowsmith Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1734641653{{Cite web |title=Books |url=https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/books |access-date=2024-04-25 |website=ARROWSMITH |language=en-US}}

=Fiction=

  • West Coast Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1963, {{oclc|38711773}}; Nurse Novels Publishing (republished in 2024)
  • Vietnam Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1966
  • Forty Whacks, Houghton Mifflin, 1969, {{ISBN|0-575-00560-2}}
  • First Marriage HarperCollins, 1974, {{ISBN|0-380-01850-0}}
  • Bronte Wilde, Avon Books, 1976, {{ISBN|978-0-380-00548-2}}
  • {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HKsv3sXetj8C&q=fanny+howe| title=Holy Smoke| publisher=University of Alabama Press| year= 1979| isbn= 978-0-914590-55-2 }}
  • The White Slave, Avon Books, 1980, {{ISBN|978-0-380-45591-1}}
  • {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QugANM1bM_8C&q=fanny+howe| title=In the Middle of Nowhere: A Novel| publisher= University of Alabama Press| year= 1984| isbn= 978-0-914590-83-5 }}
  • The Deep North, Sun & Moon Press, 1988, {{ISBN|978-1-55713-025-9}}
  • Famous Questions, Ballantine Books, 1989, {{ISBN|978-0-345-36177-6}}
  • Saving History, Sun & Moon Press, 1993, {{ISBN|978-1-55713-100-3}}
  • Nod, Sun & Moon Press, 1998, {{ISBN|1-55713-307-7}}
  • Indivisible, Semiotext(e), 2000, {{ISBN|978-1-58435-009-5}}
  • Economics: Stories, Flood Editions, 2002, {{ISBN|978-0-9710059-4-5}}
  • Radical Love: 5 Novels, Nightboat Books, 2006, {{ISBN|978-0-9767185-3-6}}
  • Night Philosophy, Divided Publishing, 2020, {{ISBN|978-1-9164250-2-6}}
  • London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World, Divided Publishing, 2022, {{ISBN|978-1-7398431-1-3}}

=Young adult fiction=

  • The Blue Hills, Avon, 1981, {{ISBN|0-380-78998-1}}
  • Yeah, But Avon/Flare, August 1982, {{ISBN|978-0-380-79186-6}}
  • Radio City Avon/Flare book, 1984, {{ISBN|978-0-380-86025-8}}
  • Taking Care, Avon Books, 1985, {{ISBN|978-0-380-89864-0}}
  • Race of the Radical, Viking Kestrel, 1985, {{ISBN|978-0-670-80557-0}}
  • What Did I Do Wrong?, Illustrator Colleen McCallion, Flood Editions, 2009, {{ISBN|978-0-9819520-0-0}}

=Essays=

  • {{cite book| url=https://archive.org/details/weddingdressmedi0000howe| url-access=registration| quote=fanny howe.| title=The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life | publisher= University of California Press| year= 2003| isbn=978-0-520-23840-4 }}
  • The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press, 2009, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-520-3}}
  • The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth, Graywolf Press, 2016, {{ISBN|978-1-55597-756-6}}

Reviews

  • Scott Bentley, [http://jacketmagazine.com/25/bentl-howe.html "On the Day the Blood Let Fall"], Jacket 25, February 2004
  • Kimberly Lamm, [https://web.archive.org/web/20110928031156/http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/archive/clarity.html "The Clarity of Fanny Howe's Debut"], University of Washington, Titanic Operas
  • Karen Volkman, [http://bostonreview.net/BR29.1/volkman.html "Fellow Travelers"], Boston Review, February/March 2004
  • Janique Vigier, [https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/fanny-howe-23894 "Spiral-Walking"] (on Night Philosophy), Bookforum, 17 February 2020

References

{{Reflist|30em}}

External links

  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20080524024346/http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Howe,F.htm Fanny Howe Informatarium]
  • [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf2f59n5xn Fanny Howe Papers]
  • [http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/see-and-hear-poetry/h-n/fanny-howe/ Griffin Poetry Prize readings, including video clips]
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20060226224752/http://www.kenyonreview.org/interviews/pfhowe.php Interview with Kenyon Review]
  • [http://www.pshares.org/authors/authordetails.cfm?prmAuthorID=720 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 contributor of poems, essays, and non-fiction. Howe was the guest-editor for a 1974 edition of Ploughshares, and has contributed to this journal as recently as 2004.
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20061229140242/http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_1_1999/fhbewild.html Bewilderment], a talk by 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. Bewilderment was collected in The Wedding Dress (2003)
  • [http://www.modern-review.com/archives/v_ii/subjectmatter_howe.html Fanny Howe Interviewed by Jennifer Moxley] for info on Jennifer Moxley (link here)
  • Leonard Schwartz, [http://jacketmagazine.com/28/schwartz-iv-howe.html "The Wedding Dress: Meditations On Word and Life"], Jacket 28, October 2005.

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Howe, Fanny}}

Category:1940 births

Category:20th-century American novelists

Category:20th-century American poets

Category:20th-century American women writers

Category:21st-century American novelists

Category:21st-century American poets

Category:21st-century American women writers

Category:American women novelists

Category:American women poets

Category:American women writers of young adult literature

Category:American young adult novelists

Category:Language poets

Category:Living people

Category:Modernist women writers

Category:Novelists from Boston

Category:Poets from Boston