Howe has become (arguably) one of the most widely read of American experimental poets. She has also published several volumes of prose, including Lives of the Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005) and The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003), a collection of essays. Several awards have been awarded to her, namely the 2001 Lenore Marshall and Poetry Prize, and the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. She is currently a professor emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Poet Michael Palmer commented:"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate,spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit. Her work displays as well a political urgency, that is to say, a profound concern for social justice and for the soundness and fate of the polis, the "city on a hill". Writes Emerson, The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. Here's the luminous and incontrovertible proof."

Bewildered in Boston by Joshua Glenn states that "Fanny Howe isn't part of the local literary canon. But her seven novels about interracial love and utopian dreaming offer a rich social history of Boston in the 1960s and '70s."

Poetry

• Eggs (1970)
• The Amerindian Coastline Poem (1975)
• Poem from a Single Pallet (1980)
• Alsace-Lorraine (1982)
• For Erato: The Meaning of Life (1984)
• Robeson Street (Alice James Books, 1985)
• Introduction to the World (1986)
• The Lives of a Spirit (1987)
• The Vineyard (1988)
• [sic] (1988)
• The End (1992)
• The Quietist (1992)
• O'Clock (1995)
• One Crossed Out (1997)
• Forged (1999)
• Selected Poems (2000) (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
• Gone (2003)
• Tis of Thee (2003)
• On the Ground (2004) (also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize)
• The Lives of a Spirit/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (2005)
• The Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2007)

Fiction

• Forty Whacks (1969)
• First Marriage (1974)
• Bronte Wilde (1976)
• Holy Smoke (1979)
• The White Slave (1980)
• In the Middle of Nowhere: A Novel (1984)
• The Deep North (1988)
• Famous Questions (1989)
• Saving History (1992)
• Nod (1998)
• Indivisible (2000)
• Economics: Stories (2002)
• Radical Love: 5 Novels (2006)

Young Adult Fiction

• The Blue Hills (1981)
• Yeah, But (1982)
• Radio City (1984)
• Taking Care (1985)
• Race of the Radical (1985)

Essays

• The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003)
• The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (2009)