The Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University will host a virtual lecture by award-winning writer of prose and poetry Fanny Howe, whose work has been described as “unique in contemporary poetry for its exploration of religious faith, ethics, politics, and suffering.”
"God is always in the same everyplace, without an adjective, an adverb, or a verb tense. The creator is creation itself. A baboon has knowledge of God just as a bee does, and a human child or a leaf."
— Fanny Howe
On Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 7:30 p.m. the 2020 Catholicism and the Arts Lecture will be presented by author and poet Fanny Howe. This virtual event is free and open to the public via registration at fairfield.edu/cs.
Howe’s lecture title, “Embryonic,” is taken from the first essay in her nonfiction work Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth. Writer and professor Kimberly Lamm described Howe’s work as “unique in contemporary poetry for its exploration of religious faith, ethics, politics, and suffering.”
“If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle,” Howe told an interviewer for the Kenyon Review in 2004.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, including Night Philosophy (2020), Love and I (2019), and Second Childhood (2014). She grew up in Boston and taught literature and writing for decades at MIT, Tufts, and elsewhere before teaching at University of California, San Diego where she is currently professor emerita in literature.
Through her teaching, Howe has mentored a generation of young American poets, activists, and scholars. In addition to National Endowment for the Arts and National Poetry Foundation awards, she received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement and was a 2014 National Book Finalist for Second Childhood.
Fanny Howe’s lecture, "Embryonic,” is free and open to the public. It will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m. via Zoom webinar. To register to attend, please visit the Center for Catholic Studies webpage at fairfield.edu/cs.
