Marie Howe

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Marie Howe (born 1950) is a noted American poet.

[edit] Life

Born in Rochester, New York, Howe was the oldest of nine children. She attended Sacred Heart Convent School and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Windsor. She worked briefly as a newspaper reporter in Rochester and as a high school English teacher in Massachusetts.^[1] Howe did not devote serious attention to writing poetry until she turned 30. At the suggestion of an instructor in a writers' workshop, Howe applied to and was accepted at Columbia University where she studied with Stanley Kunitz and received her M.F.A. in 1983.^[2]^[3]

Howe's first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. Howe's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. "John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely," she has said.^[4] In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and storie entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems, What the Living Do; the title poem in the collection is a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: "I am living, I remember you."

Howe is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught writing at Tufts University and Warren Wilson College. She is presently on the writing faculties at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City with her adopted daughter.

[edit] Works

The Good Thief (1987)
In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, (ed., with Michael Klein) (1995)
What the Living Do (1998)
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008)