Marie Howe

Marie Howe (born 1950 Rochester, New York) is an American poet.

Life
Howe is the oldest girl 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. 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.

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.

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. She lives in New York City with her daughter.

Recognition
Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.

Honors and awards

 * 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
 * 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship

Poetry

 * The Good Thief. Persea Books, 1988.
 * What the Living Do. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998.
 * The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2008.

Edited

 * In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, (edited with Michael Klein). Persea Books, 1995.