Marie Howe was born in 1950 and received her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Her debut volume, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, published in 1988 by Persea Books. Since then, she has published two more collections, What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998) and The Kingdom of the Ordinary (2008). In 1995, she edited (with Michael Klein) the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. About her work, the poet Stanley Kunitz has said, “Marie Howe’s poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life.” Her awards include a fellowship at the Bunting Institute, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has served on the faculty of several schools, including Tufts University and Dartmouth College. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her daughter. In August 2012 she was named the State Poet Laureate of New York State.