Honor Moore

Acclaimed Poet, Memoirist & Writer
Author of The Bishop's Daughter

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  • An Evening with Honor Moore

Biography

“The streak of white daubed inside each poem is like a secret ticket to lightness and shining. Are these poem or paintings? Hard to say because their pleasures cross all such boundaries, placing Honor Moore among the happy poets.” —Fanny Howe

“Moore’s poems are perfectly formed yet impassioned…incantations recited to transform confession and grief into liberation and warmth.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

Honor Moore’s most recent memoir, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury (W. W. Norton, 2020), is a daughter’s memoir of her mother that evolves beautifully into a narrative of the sweeping changes in women’s lives in the twentieth century. Her acclaimed memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008, an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review, and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book.

Moore is also the author of three collections of poems: Red ShoesDarling, and Memoir. She is the editor of, most recently, Women’s Liberation: Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can, as well as Poems From the Women’s Movement, which was an Oprah Summer Reading pick in 2009, and Amy Lowell: Selected Poems; co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt; and translator of Revenge by Taslima Nasrin released in 2010. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. From 2005 to 2007, Moore was an off-Broadway theatre critic for The New York Times.

Honor Moore has received awards in all the genres in which she writes, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 in Nonfiction for The Bishop’s Daughter, awards from the NEA and Connecticut Commission on The Arts in Poetry, and from The New York State Council on the Arts in Playwriting for Mourning Pictures. Poems and prose have appeared in The American Scholar, Salmagundi, Conjunctions, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Open City, the Paris Review, Grove, and other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and was Bedell Visiting Distinguished Writer in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010. She has taught nonfiction in the graduate program at Columbia University School of the Arts and has been Poet-in-Residence at Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City.

Short Bio

Honor Moore is the author of two memoirs Our Revolution, and The Bishop’s Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. She is also the author of the poetry collections Red Shoes; other poetry titles are Darling and Memoir. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, The New Republic, Freeman’s and many other journals and anthologies.  For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah summer readings pick which is featured in the documentary about American feminism, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.” When she was still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in poetry about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway and won her a fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and reissued in 2009, was a New York Times Notable Book. Moore currently lives and writes in New York where she is on the graduate writing faculty of the New School.

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