What the Earth Seemed to Say

Marie Howe is the author of five books of poetry. Her retrospective, What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), draws on four collections published in the US: Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Marie Howe’s brother John, who died from AIDS in 1989. She also co-edited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea Books, 1995). Born in 1950 in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Stanley Kunitz selected her for a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1988. Her other awards include the 2015 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, as well as grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the first Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014, and is poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City. She has taught at Tufts University and Dartmouth College, among other institutions. In 2018 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.