Two women with ties to the academic world been named Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. The honorary position has been held by some of America’s most distinguished poets. Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets consult with the members of organization on matters of artistic programming, serve as judges for the organization’s largest prizes for poets, and act as ambassadors of poetry in the world at large.
Marilyn Chin is a professor emerita at San Diego State University in California. She also taught at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Professor Chin was born in Hong Kong but raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. Her most recent published work is Hard Love Province (W.W. Norton, 2014), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
In announcing the honor, the academy said that Chin “has made a distinct contribution to American letters, working in various genres over the past four decades. Distinguished by its formal inventiveness, startling images and compelling meditations on migration, belonging, and love, her poetry has been a profoundly humane and fiercely beautiful testament of our times.”
Marie Howe teaches poetry at New York University and Sarah Lawrence College. A native of Rochester, New York, she worked as a journalist and a teacher before earning a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University. She is the author of several books including Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017) and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009).
The Academy of American Poets said that Howe “is an iconic poet, both for individual poems and for her books as a whole. Her work seamlessly covers the full spectrum of awareness, encompassing the realms of the spiritual, ethical, erotic, parental, personal, and societal. Her compassion is broad, her moral compass unerring, her hammered-copper craft-sense consummately original, clear, and distinctive.”