Discipline: Literature – poetry

Marie Howe

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Cambridge, MA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1987
Marie Howe is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017). In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York. 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. She has taught writing at Tufts University and Warren Wilson College. 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."

Studios

Heyward

Marie Howe worked in the Heyward studio.

The Lodge Annex, a wing on the west side of the men’s dormitory (The Lodge), was completed in 1926. Initially intended as an apartment for a caretaker, the space was soon repurposed as a live-in studio for writers. In recognition of a major endowment gift from the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, Lodge Annex was…

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