Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Golden Rose Award with Marie Howe

The New England Poetry Club is proud to award the 2026 Golden Rose Award, one of America’s oldest literary prizes, to Marie Howe. This award has honored over a century’s worth of American poets whose work has deepened the imaginative life of our nation.  This event concludes the second and culminating summer of We (too) The People, an NEPC collaboration with the  Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters.

Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems, (W.W. Norton 2024), which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. She is the poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Marie Howe’s The Good Thief (1988) was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” In that collection, Howe’s oracular yet self-doubting speakers often voice their concerns through Biblical and mythical allusions. Kunitz, on selecting the book for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, observed, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”

Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU. She coedited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She is the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Howe lives in New York City.

The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.

In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.