Howe, Fanny, 1940-

Fanny Howe, born in Buffalo (N.Y.) in 1940, is an award-winning poet, novelist, and filmmaker. She is the author of over 50 books of poetry and prose, including Manimal Woe (2021), Love and I: Poems (2019), Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth (2016), Second Childhood (2014), The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (2009), The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003) and Indivisible (2000).

Howe was raised in Cambridge (Mass.) with her sisters, Susan Howe and Helen Howe Braider, who are also artists. Her father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, Jr., was a professor at Harvard Law School, a WWII veteran, a civil rights lawyer, and the first Charles Warren Professor in the History of American Law. Howe's mother, Mary Manning Howe, acted in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, before emigrating to the United States, where she founded the experimental Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge in 1950.

The journals in this collection begin in the Boston area, around the time of Howe’s father’s death (in 1967) and her early married years with writer and activist Carl Senna. The diaries also document the births and raising of her children, the development of her philosophical, political, and spiritual ideas, including her first encounter with the work of Simone Weil (in 1970) and her conversion to Catholicism (in 1982), and the research and thinking behind a range of Howe’s poetry and prose collections. In 1989, Howe moved to San Diego to assume a tenured faculty position at UCSD. She remained there until her retirement in 2000, when she returned to the East Coast.

Over the course of her active career, Howe also taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Georgetown University. After UCSD, she spent several years traveling, teaching, and writing in such locations as West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard (where she purchased a cottage in 1998; later sold in 2015), New York City, Washington, DC, London, and as an annual resident (for over 22 years) at Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick, Ireland. From 2010-2022, she resided in West Cambridge, with frequent visits to see her children in Oxford, England (Ann Lucien Senna); Pasadena, California (Danzy Senna); and Martha’s Vineyard/Boston/Santa Cruz (Maceo Senna). At the time of this donation, she resided in West Cambridge.

[Source: text by Christina Davis for finding aid for Fanny Howe notebooks and diaries, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2022 April]

Fanny Howe is Professor of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and poetry, most recently, One Crossed Out, 1997.

From the guide to the Howe, Fanny. Papers, 1981-1995, (Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.)