Fanny Quincy Howe (October 15, 1940 – July 8, 2025) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Early life, education and marriage
Howe was born in Buffalo, New York on October 15, 1940.
Her father Mark DeWolfe Howe (son of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe) was then teaching at the state university law school. When her father 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 Howe was born after their father's return from the war.) There the family lived through the children's childhoods.
Later in life, Fanny did not identify with her father's cultural background of the so-called Boston Brahmins, though she admired him personally.
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.
Howe's mother had been an actress at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for some time before coming to the United States in 1935. She also wrote several plays performed there and at the Gate Theatre.
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, a microbiologist. They had no children and divorced two years later.
As a civil rights activist, she met fellow activist Carl Senna; they married in 1968. (Their daughter Danzy Senna recalled: "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."
Writing career
She published two paperback original "pulp" novels under the
pseudonym Della Field during the 1960s.
Known as "Nurse Novels," one book featured a nurse in the Vietnam War while the other was about a nurse living in San Francisco.
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 pursued questions similar to theirs.
She converted to Catholicism at the age of 40.
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 continued to publish novels and essays throughout her career.
Howe taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University.
Reception
Poet Michael Palmer finds that "Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit."
In 2004, Joshua Glenn of The Boston Globe wrote that Fanny Howe "isn't part of the local literary canon," but that her novels offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and '70s.
Death
Howe died at a hospice in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on July 8, 2025, at the age of 84.
Publications
Poetry
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Eggs: poems, Houghton Mifflin, 1970
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The Amerindian Coastline Poem, Telephone Books Press, 1975,
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Poem from a Single Pallet, Kelsey Street Press, 1980,
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Alsace-Lorraine, Telephone Books Press, 1982,
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For Erato: The Meaning of Life, 1984
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Robeson Street, Alice James Books, 1985,
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Introduction to the World, Figures, 1986,
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The Lives of a Spirit, Sun & Moon Press, 1987,
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The Vineyard, Lost Roads Publishers, 1988,
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sic, Parentheses Writing Series, October 1988,
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The End, Littoral Books, 1992
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The Quietist, O Books, 1992,
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O'Clock, Reality Street, 1995,
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One Crossed Out, Graywolf Press, 1997,
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Forged, Post-Apollo Press, 1999,
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A Folio for Fanny Howe, Spectacular Diseases, 1999 (includes the long poem "Q")
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Selected Poems, University of California Press, 2000, (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
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Gone, University of California Press, 2003
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Tis of Thee, Atelos, 2003,
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On the Ground, Graywolf Press, 2004, (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
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The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken Nightboat Books, 2005,
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The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, 2007,
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(with Henia Karmel-Wolfe and Ilona Karmel) A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond, University of California Press, 2007,
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Emergence, Reality Street, 2010,
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Outremer, Poetry Magazine, September 2011,
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Come and See: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2011,
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Love and I: Poems, Graywolf Press, 2019,
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Manimal Woe, Arrowsmith Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1734641653
Fiction
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West Coast Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1963, ; Nurse Novels Publishing (republished in 2024)
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Vietnam Nurse (under the pseudonym Della Field), Avon, 1966
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Forty Whacks, Houghton Mifflin, 1969,
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First Marriage HarperCollins, 1974,
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Bronte Wilde, Avon Books, 1976,
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The White Slave, Avon Books, 1980,
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The Deep North, Sun & Moon Press, 1988,
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Famous Questions, Ballantine Books, 1989,
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Saving History, Sun & Moon Press, 1993,
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Nod, Sun & Moon Press, 1998,
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Indivisible, Semiotext(e), 2000, (republished in 2022, with forward by Eugene Lim)
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Economics: Stories, Flood Editions, 2002,
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Radical Love: 5 Novels, Nightboat Books, 2006,
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Night Philosophy, Divided Publishing, 2020,
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London-rose | Beauty Will Save the World, Divided Publishing, 2022,
Young adult fiction
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The Blue Hills, Avon, 1981,
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Yeah, But Avon/Flare, August 1982,
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Radio City Avon/Flare book, 1984,
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Taking Care, Avon Books, 1985,
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Race of the Radical, Viking Kestrel, 1985,
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What Did I Do Wrong?, Illustrator Colleen McCallion, Flood Editions, 2009,
Essays
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The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Graywolf Press, 2009,
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The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth, Graywolf Press, 2016,
External links
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Obituary on the Poetry Foundation Homepage
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Fanny Howe Informatarium
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Fanny Howe Papers
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Griffin Poetry Prize readings, including video clips
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Interview with Kenyon Review
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Fanny Howe page at Ploughshares includes links to Howe's contributions to Ploughshares that began in 1972 with an excerpt from an early novel. Later, she was a consistent contributor of poems, essays, and non-fiction. Howe was the guest-editor for a 1974 edition of Ploughshares, and contributed to this journal as late as 2004.
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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)
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Fanny Howe Interviewed by Jennifer Moxley for info on Jennifer Moxley (link here)
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Leonard Schwartz, "The Wedding Dress: Meditations On Word and Life", Jacket 28, October 2005.
