Marilyn Hacker (born November 27, 1942) is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.

Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of a Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

Early life and education

Hacker was born and raised in Bronx, New York, the only child of Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a management consultant and her mother a teacher. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, where she met her future husband Samuel R. Delany, who would become a well-known science-fiction writer. She enrolled at New York University at the age of fifteen (B.A., 1964). Three years later, Hacker and Delany traveled from New York to Detroit and were married. In The 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." They settled in New York's East 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 a lesbian, and Delany is a gay man.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hacker worked mostly in commercial editing. <!--She returned to NYU, edited the university literary magazine, publishing poems by Charles Simic and Grace Schulman, and an early screenplay by Martin Scorsese.--><!--commenting that out because I can't verify it - if you can, cite a source and put it back--> She graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in Romance Languages in 1964. After moving to London in 1970, she found an audience through the pages of The London Magazine and Ambit.

In 1990 she became the first full-time editor of the Kenyon Review, a position she held until 1994. She was noted for "broaden[ing] the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints." 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."

Hacker served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2008 to 2014.

Hacker lives in New York and Paris and has retired from teaching at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2014, she published a collaboration with a Palestinian-American poet, Deema Shehabi, written in the style of a Japanese renga, a form of alternating call and answer. The book, Diaspo/renga: a collaboration in alternating renga explores the emotional journey of living in exile.

In a review of the 2015 collection A Stranger's Mirror, Carol Muske-Dukes comments that Hacker has not received her "due as one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today." In a laudatory review of Hacker's 2019 collection Blazons, 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."

Bibliography

Poetry

  • Presentation Piece (1974) —winner of the National Book Award
  • Separations (1976)
  • Taking Notice (1980)
  • Assumptions (1985)
  • Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986)
  • Going Back to the River (1990)
  • The Hang-Glider's Daughter: New and Selected Poems (1991)
  • Selected Poems: 1965 - 1990 (1994)
  • Winter Numbers: Poems (1995)
  • Squares and Courtyards (2000)
  • Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (2003)
  • First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003)
  • Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (2006)
  • Names: Poems (2009)
  • A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994 - 2014 (2015)
  • Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000 - 2018 (2019), Carcanet Press,
  • Calligraphies: Poems (2023), W. W. Norton & Company,

Translations

  • de Dadelsen, Jean-Paul (2020). That Light, All at Once, Translator, Marilyn Hacker, Yale University Press.
  • Goffette, Guy (2007). Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, A Bilingual Edition, Translator, Marilyn Hacker, The University of Chicago Press.
  • Malroux, Claire (2005). Birds and Bison, Translator, Marilyn Hacker, Syracuse University Press.
  • Malroux, Claire (2020). Daybreak (2020), Translator, Marilyn Hacker, New York Review Books. ISBN 9781681375021
  • Khoury-Ghata, Vénus (2003). She Says, Translator, Marilyn Hacker, Graywolf Press.
  • Khoury-Ghata, Vénus (2022). The Water People, Translator, Marilyn Hacker, The Poetry Translation Centre, U.K.
  • Madani, Rachida (2012), Tales of a Severed Head. Trans. Marilyn Hacker. New Haven: Yale UP.
  • Negrouche, Samira (2020). The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems. Translator Marilyn Hacker. Pleiades Press.

Anthologies

  • (edited with Samuel R. Delany) Quark/1 (1970, science fiction)
  • (edited with Samuel R. Delany) Quark/2 (1971, science fiction)
  • (edited with Samuel R. Delany) Quark/3 (1971, science fiction)
  • (edited with Samuel R. Delany) Quark/4 (1971, science fiction)

Literary criticism

  • Hacker, Marilyn. Unauthorized Voices (Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press, 2010)

References

  • Marilyn Hacker at www.poets.org
  • Marilyn Hacker at Ploughshares
  • Marilyn Hacker's 'Translator's Preface' to King of a Hundred Horseman
  • Marilyn Hacker Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.