Fan Faire West

Fanny Howe loved God, vitamin G (gossip), and cosmic laughter. A Boston Brahmin and a descendant of the earliest settlers of Massachusetts, she broke the mold when she dropped out of Stanford, went to the movies with Samuel Beckett in Paris, gave birth to three biracial children, and converted to Catholicism. Her many novels and books of poetry and essays are deeply influenced by theologians and philosophers including Emmanuel Levinas, Georgio Agamben, Simone Weil, St. Francis, and the Benedictine monks she visited regularly on her trips to Ireland.

Hanging around Warhol’s Factory in her youth, Howe was crowned “slum goddess of the Bowery.” After her death in 2025, Kaveh Akbar called Howe “a titan.” She was too birdlike and peripatetic to be a matriarch, but she was the mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother of writers Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Jennifer Tseng, and Issa Quincy. Howe has influenced writers and artists across genres—Hilton Als, Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles—and we who are celebrating the publication of her last volume, This Poor Book, with reminiscences and poems.

Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, All the Dirty Parts, and Bottle Grove, and most recently a memoir, And Then? And Then? What Else? As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of far too many books for children, including Poison for Breakfast, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions and the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has been adapted for screen and television.

Linda Norton is the author of three books: The Public Gardens: Poems and History (introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Wite Out: Love and Work, and Cloud of Witnesses: Essays, Poems, Collages. Excerpts from her work in progress, The Ruins: A Memoir of Irish Women Lost and Found, appear in Harvard Review and earned her fellowships from Nomadic Press, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Leopardi Writer’s Conference. Norton is also a collage artist whose work has appeared in and on the covers of her own books and books by Claudia Rankine, Fanny Howe, and Maureen Owen.

Katie Peterson is the author, most recently, of Fog and Smoke (2024) and Life in a Field (2021). Previous collections have won the Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas and been nominated for the Northern California Book Award. Recent essays and poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Literary Imagination, and McSweeney’s, and her writing on Fanny Howe will be published this year in SpOke. She has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foundation from Contemporary Arts, the Radcliffe Institute, and St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford University. She is Professor of English at UC Davis.

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