Poet Marie Howe Will Read Works, Meet With Student Writers During Residency Nov. 11-12

Poet Marie Howe, author of the critically acclaimed volumes What the Living Do and The Good Thief, will give a reading 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11, in Lafayette’s Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

As Lafayette’s Closs Visiting Writer-in-Residence, Howe also will share a luncheon with Contemporary Fiction students, participate in other English classes, including Literary Women, Modern & Contemporary Poetry, and Literary Questions, and meet with individual student writers. Her residency will conclude with a question-and-answer session and closing reception in the Marlo Room of Farinon College Center 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12.

The residency is sponsored by the English department through the Ruth Mary Callahan Closs Fund established by Fred Closs, a long-time member of the English faculty and originator of Lafayette’s Roethke Humanities Festival, along with Joan Closs in memory of his mother, Ruth Mary Callahan Closs, to encourage student writing.

Howe has described her writing as “often trying to move into those silent places to what I can’t remember, to what I am told I shouldn’t remember.”

Recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Howe’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Agni, Harvard Review, and New England Review, among others. The Good Thief was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series, while What the Living Do was named one of the five best books of poetry published in 1997 by Publishers Weekly. She also is co-editor of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.

Howe is a winner of the I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Prize from American Academy of Poets, the Mary Ingram Bunting fellowship from Radcliffe College, and a fellowship from Massachusetts Artist’s Foundation. She teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.