Marie Howe

Marie Howe (born 1950) is an American poet. Howe served as New York Poet Laureate from 2012–2016. She is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Poet-in-Residence at The Cathedral of St John the Divine. Throughout her career, she has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

In 1987, her debut collection The Good Thief was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. Her subsequent collections include What the Living Do (1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), and Magdalene (2017), which was Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry. In 2024 W. W. Norton & Company published her New & Selected Poems, while Bloodaxe Books published its UK companion, What the Earth Seemed to Say, to critical acclaim.

Early life Howe was born in Rochester, New York. In a 2013 interview with On Being, Howe would note that

In the 1960s, Howe enrolled in the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a socially progressive, parochial all-girls school, where the nuns centered what Theology has to do with “social justice, service, questioning, and authority.”

In 1981, Howe relocated to Concord, Massachusetts. When reflecting on this time later in life, Howe would note that

Every day I would walk to the old North Bridge and visit Thoreau’s Grave and Emerson's grave. I was so lonely, lonely, lonely. And I learned how to sit still. And how to sit in a chair and bang on a typewriter. You know. You have to learn how to sit still. I didn’t know how to do that. It took me a long time. I applied to graduate schools and I went. It was a miracle.

She has taught writing at Tufts University and Warren Wilson College. She is presently on the writing faculties at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University.

Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. 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's brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. "John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely," she has said. In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.

In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Literary themes and style

Marie Howe is praised for her poetry which captures the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of everyday life. Despite the strong themes in her writing, Howe subtly expresses these messages through the explanation of daily tasks and regular lifestyles in most of her poems.

Her first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was made philosophical and reflective with the incorporation of Biblical and mythical allusions. Margaret Atwood, who chose this book for the National Poetry Series, praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.”

A year after the publication of her first poetry book (1989), Howe’s brother John died from AIDS. According to Howe in an AGNI interview, “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” 2001: Radcliffe Fellowship, Harvard University 1998: Guggenheim Fellowship 2008: Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Finalist 2012: New York State Poet Laureate 2015: Academy of American Poets Fellowship 2017: National Book Award, Longlist 2017: Robert Creeley Award 2017: The Jerome J. Shestack Prize, The American Poetry Review 2018: Academy of American Poets Chancellor 2020: Poet in Residence, The Cathedral of St. John the Divine 2025: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,

Published works Poetry Collections

The Good Thief. Persea Books. 1988.

Anthologies Counting Time Like People Count Stars, (by Luis J. Rodríguezed, ed. by Spencer Reece, Foreword by Marie Howe, Afterword by Richard Blanco, Northwestern University Press, 2017) In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, (ed., with Michael Klein, Persea Books, 1995)