Sarah Howe
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Born in Hong Kong, Sarah Howe is a Chinese-British poet, academic, and editor. She is the author of Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), her first collection of poems.
As a Radcliffe fellow, Howe continues to work on a new volume of poems. The sequence she is presently working on, “Two Systems,” explores the historical encounter between China and the West, working toward Hong Kong’s present struggle for democracy. The poems use techniques such as the reshaping of found material and poetic “erasures” as a way of giving shape to political uncertainty and cultural amnesia—the absences as well as the traces in memory’s terrain.
Howe earned her PhD at Christ’s College Cambridge and was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University. In 2010 she won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious prize for poets under the age of 30. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, a journal of poetry and criticism. Her debut chapbook was A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and her poems have appeared in magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry London, and the Poetry Review; in anthologies such as The Best British Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2014, 2013, 2012) and Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe Books, 2013); and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She has been a research fellow at Gonville & Caius College and held the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry and Literature at St John’s College Cambridge.
Radcliffe Fellow Sheds Light on the Science of Poetry (Harvard Gazette, 10/8/15)
