Nightboat Books mourns the passing of Fanny Howe, who died on July 9, 2025, at the age of 84. Howe authored our first and third titles: the essay Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and a collection of five of her novels, Radical Love (2006). She also wrote numerous books of poetry, including One Crossed Out, Gone, Second Childhood, and Selected Poems. Her essay collections include The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She was the recipient of the 2009 Lilly Prize for Poetry and a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego.
Kazim Ali, Nightboat’s co-founder and chairperson, writes:
There would be no Nightboat Books without Fanny Howe. It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.
Fanny once told me, in our life-long conversation about God, literature, and the world, that she thought Gnosticism was evil. What she found so evil was the belief that the material world was inferior to, or somehow separate from, the spiritual one. This world was the world to Fanny. “Human was God’s secret name,” she said in one poem. “If this life isn’t enough, then an afterlife won’t be enough,” she said in another.
To live in this rich, infinite world was the most important thing to her. “One cathedral is equal to the sky,” she wrote. And to God, she begged, “no answers, please, to any of my questions.”
Her life and work were conjoined in a long, lucid series of questions.. How lucky we all are to have heard her askings.