Marilyn Hacker

1942 –
Read poems by this poet

Born in New York City on November 27, 1942, Marilyn Hacker was the only child of a working-class Jewish couple, each the first in their families to attend college. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science before enrolling at New York University, where she received a BA in Romance languages in 1964.

Hacker moved to London in 1970, where she worked as a book dealer. With the mentorship of Richard Howard, then the editor of The New American Review, Hacker’s first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, was published by Viking Press in 1974. The collection was both the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection and the recipient of the National Book Award.

In 1976, Hacker’s second collection of poems, Separations, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, followed by Taking Notice (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) and Assumptions (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). In 1986, Hacker published Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (Arbor House), an auto-fictional narrative told mainly through sonnets. In 1990, she published Going Back to the River (Vintage Books), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award.

Hacker’s 1994 collection, Winter Numbers (W. W. Norton), details the loss of many of her friends to both AIDS and cancer, and explores her own struggle with breast cancer. The collection, which was in many ways darker than Hacker’s previous work, won both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

Since then, Hacker has published many more collections: Calligraphies (W. W. Norton, 2023) Blazons (Carcanet, 2019); A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994–2013 (W. W. Norton, 2015); Names (W. W. Norton, 2010); Desesperanto: Poems 1999–2002 (W. W. Norton, 2003); First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960–1979 (W. W. Norton, 2003); and Squares and Courtyards (W. W. Norton, 2000).

About Hacker’s work, the poet Jan Heller Levi has said:

I think of her magnificent virtuosity in the face of all the strictures to be silent, to name her fears and her desires, and in the process, to name ours. Let’s face it, no one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. No one can jump around in two, sometimes even three, languages and come up with poems that speak for those of us who sometimes barely think we can even communicate in one. And certainly no one has done more, particularly in the last decade of formalism, to demonstrate that form has nothing to do with formula. In villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets—not to mention a variety of forms whose names I can’t even pronounce—Marilyn Hacker can journey us on a single page through feelings as confusing as moral certainty to feelings as potentially empowering as unrequited passion.

Hacker is also highly regarded for her criticism, editing, and translations. She served as the editor of The Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994. As a translator, she has published Claire Malroux’s Birds and Bison (Sheep Meadow Press, 2004) and A Long-Gone Sun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2000); Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s collections Nettles (Graywolf Press, 2008), She Says (Graywolf Press, 2003), and Here There Was Once a Country (Oberlin College Press, 2001); Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues (Princeton University Press, 2007); Marie Ettiene’s King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; Hédi Kaddour’s Treason (Yale, 2010); Emmanuel Moses’s He and I (Oberlin, 2010); Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head (Yale, 2012); Habib Tengour’s Crossings (Post-Apollo Press, 2013); and Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleiades Press, 2020).

Hacker’s essay collection, Unauthorized Voices: Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987–2009, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2010. 

Hacker has received numerous honors, including the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize from the Beit as-Shir/House of Poetry in Morocco, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2008, Hacker was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris.