Marie Howe has won the Pultizer Prize for Poetry 2025 for her retrospective, What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), which was first published in the US by W.W. Norton as New and Selected Poems.
The $15,000 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry is awarded annually to a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author. The Jury for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry comprised of Carl Phillips (Chair), Joy Harjo, Deborah Paredez, Brenda Shaughnessy and Brian Turner who claimed this is "a collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness."
What the Earth Seemed to Say gathers together more than three decades of profound, luminous poetry from one of America’s most daring and courageous poets. Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of her four previous collections, including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss – and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is ‘a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy’ (Dorianne Laux).
Marie Howe is the author of five books of poetry. Born in 1950 in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe worked as a newspaper reporter and teacher before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Her other awards include the 2015 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, as well as grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the first Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014, and is poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City. She has taught at Tufts University and Dartmouth College, among other institutions. In 2018 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
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