Fanny Howe grew up in Boston. She raised her three children in New England and traveled between there and California for many years, teaching both poetry and fiction. She has written many books of poetry, including Selected Poems (2000), Gone (2003), On the Ground (2004), The Lyrics (2007) and Come and See (2011). She has also written novels, five of which have been collected in one volume from Nightboat Books called Radical Love. In recent years she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, an award for her poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

"The questions Howe asks are classic for good reason: Can anyone ever let anyone else in, really? And once they have, can they let go? The last lines provide a kind of answer that might take someone a lifetime to understand and express."—Hayley Mlotek, The Atlantic“I have not the least doubt that her work is parallel to Paul Auster’s . . . or any other writer thus whose books are not simply products for the market–albeit the work can reach a very large number of potential readers indeed. In Fanny’s case these will range from contemporary fellow writers questioning ways and means in their art and all who find their enterprise of interest, to those who feel themselves confronted with deeply ingrained questions of religion, person, society, gender, politics, which almost anyone alive at this moment is trying to answer.”—Robert Creeley