Marie Howe

Marie Howe (born 1950 Rochester, New York) is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2008). In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York.

Early life

Howe is the eldest girl of nine children. She attended Sacred Heart Convent School and earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Windsor.

Career

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. 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."