Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and taught literature and writing throughout her life, mentoring a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, until her death on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Holy Smoke
£ 11.99
Holy Smoke
Fanny Howe
At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.
Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.
Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.
Illustrated by Colleen McCallion
- 978-1-0684395-1-3
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 116 pp.
- Paperback
- 01 December 2025
About the author
Endorsements (3)
Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.
Poet of unsettled dreams.
Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.
Press (6)
Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction CollectivePacifica Radio Archives15/07/1979
Upcoming (2)
| 21 September | Edinburgh | Fanny Howe films at Embassy Gallery |
| 10 October | Christchurch | Fanny Howe films at Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery |
Another Sun
£ 11.99
Another Sun
Françoise Vergès Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
In 2005, Françoise Vergès published a book with Aimé Césaire, in which she recorded – three years before his death – powerful remarks by the poet, as incisive and combative as ever, yet imbued, as always, with the universal humanism to which he had remained committed throughout his life. It is fortunate that, drawing inspiration from this interview, Another Sun allows us to hear, in their intertwining, the voices of Césaire and Vergès herself, conveying a message of emancipation and fraternity/sorority that our world needs to hear today.
Waiting at Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport, in the city of Le Lamentin, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro browses the airport kiosk. Alongside books by Césaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up a copy of Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, a conversation between Françoise Vergès and Césaire published in 2005, and embarks. In Another Sun, Rodríguez Castro and Vergès revisit that seminal conversation, resulting in an eclectic text shaped by ongoing struggles.
With poems by Danielle Legros Georges, Wole Soyinka, Ishion Hutchinson, Clarisse Baleja Saïdi, Aimé Césaire and Jean Érian Samson.
- 978-1-0684395-2-0
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 100 pp.
- Paperback
- 04 June 2026
About the authors (2)
Françoise Vergès is a writer, decolonial anti-racist feminist and curator. She is currently working on the fabrication of premature death, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the colonial roots of fascism, private property and racism. In parallel, she is working on a film about communist anti-colonial struggles on Réunion and in the Southwest Indian Ocean based on her parents’ personal archives and her own. Her recent publications include: Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024); A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024); A Decolonial Feminism (2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020); and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2019). She has written documentary fifilms on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (both 2013) and was a project advisor for Documenta11 (2002) and La Triennale de Paris (2012). Vergès is currently senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin in 2018, recipient of a fellowship with Anne Waldman at Naropa University in 2019, and a textual residency fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2025. Her essay ‘El nuevo sublime’ was a finalist for the National Essay and Criticism Award in Colombia in 2019. Rodríguez Castro is the editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 (2020), a collection of previously unpublished lectures by Audre Lorde, which was shortlisted for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. She is also the author of The Echo (2025) and Blood (2026).
