Women With Higher Education Ties Named State Poet and State Author in New York

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has announced the appointment of the New York State Poet and the New York State Author. Both women will serve through 2014.

Marie Howe was named State Poet. She serves on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She is the author of three books of poetry including What the Living Do and The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. In addition, she was co-editor of an anthology on HIV/AIDS.

A native of Rochester, she was a newspaper reporter and high school English teacher before starting on a career as a poet at the age of 30.

Alison Lurie, the new State Author, has written 10 novels, a collection of short stories and several children’s books. Some of her best known works are The War Between the Tates and Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Lurie is a graduate of Radcliffe College at Harvard University. She taught at Cornell University from 1968 to her retirement in 1998, when she was the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature.