Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, “New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; “Magdalene: Poems”; “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”; “The Good Thief”; and “What the Living Do,” and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, “In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.” Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.
Howe lectures and gives workshops on the topics of faith, poetry and prayer. She illuminates ways to pay attention to our own intimate discourse with the divine — and how writing can become a gateway to faith. When we write we write into the unknown. Faith is not a destination but a muscle. Our arrival is evidence of the experience of faith in transformative alchemy of words, silence, music, imagination. The poem is the residue of this experience — both the residue and the way.
