Katherine Howe

Howe was born and raised in Houston, Texas. Her mother is a longtime curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[5][6] She graduated from the Kinkaid School and earned her undergraduate degree in art history and philosophy at Columbia University. She began writing fiction while doing graduate work; she earned an MA in American and New England Studies at Boston University.[2] She teaches at Cornell University.[1]

In 2016 she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where she was finishing a novel set "among the corsairs of the Gulf Coast that imagines Texas’s role within the broader Caribbean diaspora. It is tentatively titled The Galvez Grand. It will build on archival research about patterns of trade and settlement on Galveston Island in the 1820s while engaging with the legacy of magical realist fiction in the American Southwest and in Mexico."[2]

Howe and her husband, the economic historian Louis Hyman (author of Debtor Nation), are core members of a group informally known as the "Springfield Street Table." This batch of Cambridge-area writers and scholars gather to play poker, while trading barbs and debating culture and ideas.[7] The bestselling novelist Matthew Pearl, who also started writing fiction as a graduate student in English studies, is a core member of this group. He is sometimes credited with helping to launch Howe's literary career.[7]

Howe's ancestors settled in Essex County, Massachusetts in the 1620s. She is related to both Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe, women convicted of being witches during the Salem witch trials. Proctor was spared because she was pregnant at the time of her scheduled execution, and later among prisoners released. Howe was executed.[8]