Marie Howe will read from her latest poetry collection New and Selected Poems, followed by an on-stage conversation led by renowned poet/memoirist and University of Houston Creative Writing Program professor Nick Flynn. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Marie Howe, according to Nick Flynn, “has always come as close as any poet since Rilke to touching eternity, simply by stretching out her hand and believing that something exists beyond her grasp, beyond her knowing.” Stanley Kunitz, with whom she studied, called her poetry “luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life.” Howe sees her own work as a form of confession, conversation, and prayer. A former Poet Laureate of New York State, she is the author of five volumes of poetry and co-editor of the essay collection In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets.
Howe joins Inprint with her latest book New and Selected Poems, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. This volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains twenty new poems. Her poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. Howe’s New and Selected Poems was named one of NPR’s “Books We Love in 2024,” and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “a necessary compilation for times of crisis.”
Poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn has published 13 books, most recently Low (2023), a poetry collection; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents 25 years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five other poetry collections, including I Will Destroy You (2019), and four volumes of memoir. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, his acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into the film, Being Flynn (2012), starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into 15 languages.
