Marilyn Hacker | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1942-11-27)November 27, 1942 (age 83) Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Poet, Translator, Critic |
Marilyn Hacker (born November 27, 1942) is an Americanpoet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at theCity College of New York.
Her books of poetry includePresentation Piece (1974), which won theNational Book Award,[1]Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), andGoing Back to the River (1990). In 2003, Hacker won theWillis Barnstone Translation Prize. In 2009, she subsequently won thePEN Award for Poetry in Translation forKing of a Hundred Horsemen byMarie Étienne,[2] which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from theNational Poetry Series. In 2010, she received thePEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.[3] She was shortlisted for the 2013PEN Award for Poetry in Translation[4] for her translation ofTales of a Severed Head by Rachida Madani.
Hacker was born and raised inBronx, New York, the only child of Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a management consultant and her mother a teacher.[5][non-tertiary source needed] Hacker attended theBronx High School of Science, where she met her future husbandSamuel R. Delany, who would become a well-knownscience-fiction writer. She enrolled atNew York University at the age of fifteen (B.A., 1964). Three years later, Hacker and Delany traveled from New York toDetroit and were married. InThe Motion of Light in Water, Delany said they married in Detroit because of age-of-consent laws and because he was African-American and she was Caucasian: "there were only two states in the union where we could legally wed. The closest one was Michigan."[6] They settled in New York'sEast Village. Their daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, was born in 1974. Hacker and Delany, after being separated for many years, were divorced in 1980, but remain friends. Hacker is alesbian,[7] and Delany is agay man.[8]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hacker worked mostly in commercial editing.[9] She graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in Romance Languages in 1964.[10]
Hacker's first publication was inCornell University'sEpoch.[11] After moving to London in 1970, she found an audience through the pages ofThe London Magazine andAmbit.[9] She and her husband edited the magazineQuark: A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction (4 issues; 1970–71). Early recognition came for her whenRichard Howard, then editor of theNew American Review, accepted three of Hacker's poems for publication.[9]
In 1974, when she was thirty-one,Presentation Piece was published by The Viking Press. The book was aLamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and won the annualNational Book Award for Poetry.[1]Winter Numbers, which details the loss of many of her friends toAIDS and her own struggle withbreast cancer, garnered aLambda Literary Award andThe Nation'sLenore Marshall Poetry Prize.[11] HerSelected Poems 1965-1990 received the 1996Poets' Prize, andSquares and Courtyards won the 2001Audre Lorde Award.[5] She received an Award in Literature from theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.[9]
Hacker often employs strict poetic forms in her poetry: for example, inLove, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, which is averse novel insonnets. She is also recognized as a master of "French forms" such as therondeau andvillanelle.[12]
In 1990 she became the first full-time editor of theKenyon Review, a position she held until 1994. She was noted for "broaden[ing] the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints."[13] In a 2005 essay discussing the theme of food and drink in Hacker's poetry, scholar Mary Biggs describes her work as frequently referring to three "interlinked, paradoxical themes: (1) love and sex; (2) travel, exile, diaspora-counterpoised with family, community, home; and (3) the eternal and, for her, eternally positive association of women with nurturance and with homemaking in the broadest sense."[14]
Hacker served as a Chancellor of theAcademy of American Poets from 2008 to 2014.[10]
Hacker lives in New York and Paris and has retired from teaching at theCity College of New York and theCUNY Graduate Center.[5]
Though not a character, a poem of Hacker's is reprinted inHeavenly Breakfast, Delany's memoir of aGreenwich Village commune in 1967; in Delany's autobiography,The Motion of Light in Water;[6] and her prose and incidents about her appear in his journals,The Journals of Samuel R. Delany: In Search of Silence, Volume 1, 1957–1969, edited by Kenneth R. James (Wesleyan University Press, 2017).
Hacker was a judge for the 2012Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. In 2013, she was inducted into theNew York Writers Hall of Fame. In 2014, she published a collaboration with a Palestinian-American poet,Deema Shehabi, written in the style of a Japaneserenga, a form of alternating call and answer. The book,Diaspo/renga: a collaboration in alternating renga explores the emotional journey of living in exile.[15]
In a review of the 2015 collectionA Stranger's Mirror,Carol Muske-Dukes comments that Hacker has not received her "due as one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today."[16] In a laudatory review of Hacker's 2019 collectionBlazons,A. M. Juster states that "there is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker."[17]
