Fanny Howe (born October 15, 1940, in Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

[3] Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.

Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe was then teaching at the state university law school.

Howe's mother was an actress at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin for some time, before coming to the United States in 1935.

Later recalling her early ambitions to be a poet, Fanny Howe attended Stanford University for three years.

Her writing career began during the 1960s with two paperback original "pulp" novels, published under the pseudonym Della Field.

Howe had long studied the writings of Edith Stein and Simone Weil, and sometimes pursues questions similar to theirs.

[11] As Zack Schlosberg writes in Cleveland Review of Books, "Suffering and seeking are two major subjects of Howe's fiction...", which he also found in her novel London-rose, written in the 1990s but not published until 2022.

Some of her essays have been collected, including The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003) Poet Michael Palmer says: Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit.

Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the "city on a hill".

[12]Joshua Glenn in The Boston Globe wrote: Fanny Howe isn't part of the local literary canon.