Fanny Howe, acclaimed writer of poetry and novels, dies at 84

And she did in more than 50 books published over nearly 60 years. With breathtaking breadth she wrote poetry and prose, novels and essays, young adult books and a memoir. Honored with major prizes for poetry and fiction, she pushed past genre divisions while traveling her own writing terrain.

“At the beginning, I would write a novel and then some poetry,” she said in an “Art of Poetry” interview in the current Paris Review, “but over time, it’s become more and more this strange mix of poetry and prose, which is where I am now.”

Ms. Howe, who both drew and departed from a family literary heritage that reached deep into Boston Brahmin and Irish traditions, died Tuesday in hospice care. Health issues had emerged and escalated quickly over the past couple of weeks upon her return home from a visit to Ireland, where she attended the opening of one of her late mother’s plays.

She was 84 and had lived in Cambridge for many years, after decades filled with a series of moves that could be as peripatetic as her writing.

“I think in the widest sense, she’s really kind of a poet’s poet,” said the poet Eileen Myles, whose own writing is as genre-spanning as her friend’s. “She’s someone whose work stumbled into an awful lot of worlds.”

Danzy Senna, a daughter of Ms. Howe who is a bestselling writer of novels and a memoir, said her mother “was a precursor to a lot of writers who are coming into their own now, exploding genre lines. There’s an interesting movement toward what she was doing decades ago.”

In 2009, the Poetry Foundation honored Ms. Howe’s lifetime achievement with its prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which includes a $100,000 award. She also was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for achievement in fiction.

Five of her novels were collected into a single volume titled “Radical Love.” Some book critics suggested those novels were at least adjacent to autobiography.

Ms. Howe sidestepped that description, writing instead in an author’s note: “I hope this collection will contribute to a literary tradition that resists distinctions between poetry and fiction as one way to save history from the doom of duality.”

Taking on subjects that ranged from the complexities of families to politics and race relations in Boston and anywhere else, Ms. Howe “spent her life interested in the lowly, those who were left out. She never looked away,” said Peter Gizzi, a University of Massachusetts professor who received the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry.

“She was truly one of the great poets of Boston and Cambridge,” he said. “Her work is of the highest order.”

In poems and prose Ms. Howe “had a terrific ear — the sound of her work is great. If you read it aloud, it’s wonderful,” said Rae Armantrout, a friend and former teaching colleague at the University of California, San Diego, who was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Ms. Howe, she added, “had both an interesting awareness of human failing, including her own, and a kind of endless interest in the world.”

Sometimes called an experimental writer — or “an experimental writer’s experimental writer,” as Anthony Domestico wrote in Commonweal Magazine — Ms. Howe mixed a ranging intellect with a warm presence.

“She was funny, and she was fun, and kind of mischievous,” Armantrout said.

“I remember her laugh,” she said, adding that at gatherings of friends, Ms. Howe would “sit at one end of the table and laugh raucously.”

Fanny Quincy Howe was born in Buffalo on Oct. 15, 1940, and moved with her mother and older sister to Cambridge soon after, while her father served in the Army during World War II.

Her mother, Mary Manning, was an Irish playwright, novelist, and actress. A founder of The Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, she counted among her close friends the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett.

Ms. Howe’s father, Mark DeWolfe Howe, was a Harvard Law School professor, writer, and civil rights activist. Ancestors on that side of the family included her grandfather Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, a Pulitzer-winner for biography, and Quincy family members who had served as Boston mayor and president of Harvard.

Her older sister, Susan Howe of Guilford, Conn., is an award-winning poet, and her younger sister, Helen Howe Braider of Boulder, Colo., is an artist.

Already keenly observant as a young girl, Ms. Howe was attentive to the differences between her life and what others endured.

“As I began to see injustice close up, I was filled with a desire to understand what made people who had suffered for nothing want to go on living,” she wrote in a 2008 essay for Poetry magazine.

She added that she became “uncomfortable with what was given to me as a birthright and what later came to be understood (by me and my culture) as meaning: White. White meant adult, condescending, cold, pale, driven, individualist, judging, and theoretical. White meant distant, detached, ironic, skeptical, ambitious, Protestant.”

A rebellious young student who courted suspensions, Ms. Howe found her way to Stanford University, which she attended for three years without taking a degree.

Ms. Howe’s stellar writing led to teaching stints at Tufts University, Emerson College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities; Kenyon College and UC San Diego, where she retired as a professor emerita.

After Ms. Howe’s time at Stanford, her brief marriage to Frederick Delafield ended in divorce.

Encouraged by her father to return to Boston, she was editing a literary magazine with poet William Corbett when she met the writer and activist Carl Senna, who was of Black and Mexican descent. They married in 1968 and had three children and an acrimonious divorce that found its way into family members’ writings.

Though Ms. Howe was born into Brahmin privilege, “there was no trust fund,” she once wrote. Her years as a single mother included multiple jobs and residences, some shared with other single mothers and their children. Danzy Senna described that time as “very bohemian, hardscrabble.”

“She was a completely free person,” Senna said. “I think she was handing the inheritance of freedom to us.”

During those years, “my most vivid memory of her is at her typewriter, just banging away at her poetry and novels and trying to block out the noise,” Senna said.

While some critics make much of the fragmented, experimental nature of some of Ms. Howe’s writing, “the form was in some ways created by necessity,” her daughter said. “I think it got more experimental because she was trying to be a writer with three children and no money — that’s the experiment.”

In addition to her daughter and two sisters, Ms. Howe leaves another daughter, Lucien Senna of Oxford, England; a son, Maceo Senna of Santa Cruz, Calif.; and six grandchildren.

A celebration of Ms. Howe’s life and work will be announced.

She converted to Catholicism as an adult and explored her relationship to faith in her writing.

“I was raised Protestant, or atheist, and I’d always felt sort of bereft in the world — like, ‘Why be here?’ Catholicism was a wonderful thing to come across when I was in such desperate straits,” she told The Paris Review.

Ms. Howe’s “very savage generosity was really coming from a very spiritual loving place that was very political in a profound way,” the poet Eileen Myles said.

Among the works in Ms. Howe’s “Selected Poems” is one titled “In the Spirit There Are No Accidents,” which begins: “God is already ahead and waiting: the future is full.”

She ends by writing: “The land is an incarnation/like a hand on a hand on an arm asking do you know me?”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].