HARRIS, Marie 1943-

PERSONAL: Born November 7, 1943, in New York, NY; daughter of Basil (a physician) and Marie (Murray) Harris; married Charter Weeks (a photographer), November 4, 1977; children: (first marriage) William, Sebastian Matthews, Manny. Education: Attended Georgetown University, 1961-63, and University of North Carolina, 1967-68; Goddard College, B.A., 1971.

ADDRESSES: Home—Barrington, NH. Office—Isinglass Marketing, P.O. Box 203, Barrington, NH 03825.

CAREER: Alice James Books, Cambridge, MA, publisher, 1974—; Maximus Advertising, Exeter, NH, copywriter, 1977—; Isinglass Marketing (business-to-business communications firm), Barrington, NH, partner, 1979—. New Hampshire Commission on the Arts Poet-in-the-Schools Program, administrator, 1972-76; Theatre-by-the-Sea, Portsmouth, NH, administrative assistant, 1976-77; gives readings at college and universities and on radio programs.

MEMBER: National Writers Union, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1976-77; New Hampshire State Council on the Arts grant; poet laureate, New Hampshire, 1999-2004.

WRITINGS:

Raw Honey (poems), Alice James Books (Cambridge, MA), 1975.

Interstate (poems), Slow Loris Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.

(Editor) Dear Winter: Poems for the Solstice, Northwoods (Stafford, VA), 1984.

(Editor) A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges inContemporary American Poetry, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1987.

(Coeditor) An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology ofContemporary American Poetry, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1989.

Weasel in the Turkey Pen, Hanging Loose Press (Brooklyn, NY), 1993.

Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Narrative, New Rivers Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1999.

G Is for Granite: A New Hampshire Alphabet, Sleeping Bear Press (Chelsea, MI), 2002.

Contributor to anthologies, including Ardis Anthology of New American Poetry, Ardis (Ann Arbor, MI), 1977; Blacksmith Anthology, Volumes I-II, Blacksmith Press;Mountain Moving Day, Crossing Press (Trumansburg, NY); The Book of Eulogies, Scribner, 1997; The Party Train, North American Prose Poetry, New Rivers, 1996; Always the Beautiful Answer, Kings Estate Press, 1999; and The Unmade Bed, Harper Collins, 1992. Contributor of articles and poems to magazines, including Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Longhouse, Hanging Loose, Rivendell, Paragraph, New Formalist, New York Times, Boston Globe, UnionLeader, and American Writer.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Catechism for a Lunar Eclipse, a book of poems.

SIDELIGHTS: Marie Harris is a New Hampshire-based poet who lives in a rural area in a home she and her husband built themselves. While not prolific, she has produced a steady stream of work for books and periodicals, in addition to running several advertising firms. Her written work includes advertising copy, travel articles, and creative nonfiction, along with poetry. She succeeded Donald Hall as poet laureate of New Hampshire.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted of Weasel in the Turkey Pen that the prose poems "move easily and unexpectedly between the real and the surreal." The same critic praised the "sense of doomed journey throughout."

Harris and her husband adopted a disadvantaged fourteen-year-old named Manny, a Puerto Rican young man who had long been a ward of the state. The prose poems in Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir, "place Manny at center stage," to quote Jacqueline White in Ruminator Review. The pieces in the book are forthright and candid about Manny's struggles to assimilate into his new life and to become a self-supporting, functioning adult. White wrote: "The mixed emotions these new parents grapple with speak to a larger cultural uncertainty. The nuclear family is imploding, children are the casualties, and yet, as a society, we hardly seem able to talk, much less act, on their behalf. [This] brave [book addresses] that silence, offering up alternative configurations of family that attempt to heal the resulting distress."

Harris is involved with arts in education, and has served as a writer-in-residence in elementary and secondary schools in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Council on the Arts Web site says Harris's plans as poet laureate "include working with town libraries and exploring the uses of the internet to accomplish her goals." Harris told the Brewster Academy during a reading for Your Sun, Manny that she views herself as an advocate for poets. "[Poets] used to be visible in society," she said, "then we somehow became locked away in ivory towers, marginalized."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 1993, Patricia Monaghan, review of Weasel in the Turkey Pen, p. 1028.

Georgia Review, fall, 1990, Anne C. Bromley, review of An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, p. 511.

Publishers Weekly, May 26, 1989, review of An Ear to the Ground, p. 60; February 1, 1993, review of Weasel in the Turkey Pen, p. 87.

Ruminator Review, fall, 2001, Jacqueline White, review of Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir, p. 31.

ONLINE

Brewster Academy Web site,http://www.brewsteracademy.org/ (January 7, 2002), "Marie Harris, New Hampshire's Poet Laureate."

New Hampshire Council on the Arts Web site,http://www.state.nh.us/nharts/ (June 25, 2002), "Marie Harris: New Hampshire's Poet Laureate, 1999-2004."