Susan Howe (born June 10, 1937) is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre (fiction, essay, prose and poetry). Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.

Howe received the 2017 Robert Frost Medal awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2011 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Howe was born on June 10, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in nearby Cambridge. Her mother, Mary Manning, was an Irish playwright and acted for Dublin's Gate Theatre. Manning was a close friend of Samuel Beckett, with whom she had a brief affair a year before Susan was born; this led to a rumour that Beckett might be her biological father, although Susan Howe has stated that DNA tests show Beckett was not her father. Her father, Mark De Wolfe Howe, was a professor at Harvard Law School and became the official biographer of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Her aunt Helen Howe was a monologuist and novelist. Howe has two younger sisters, Fanny Howe, who is also a poet; and Helen Howe Braider. Howe graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts in 1961.

Howe married painter Harvey Quaytman in 1961; they had met at the art school. They separated when their daughter was young. Howe and her daughter lived with sculptor David von Schlegell for several years before the couple married. They were together until his death in 1992. The widowed poet married again, to Peter Hewitt Hare, a philosopher and professor at the University of Buffalo. He died in January 2008.

Howe has two grown children, painter R.H. Quaytman, and writer Mark von Schlegell. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

Howe's poetry includes Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974−1979 (1996) and The Midnight (2003), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Bed Hangings with Susan Bee (2001),Souls of the Labadie Track, (2007) Frolic Architecture, (2010), "Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives" (2014) and That This (2010). Her critical work includes, My Emily Dickinson (1985), The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), and a preface to The Gorgeous Nothings (2013). Howe began publishing poetry with Hinge Picture in 1974 and was initially received as a part of the amorphous grouping of experimental writers known as the language poets-writers such as Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry anthology In the American Tree, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry.

In 2003, Howe started collaborating with experimental musician David Grubbs. The results were released on five CD's: Thiefth (featuring the poems Thorow and Melville's Marginalia), Songs of the Labadie Tract, Frolic Architecture, Woodslippercounterclatter, and Concordance.

After graduating from high school, Howe spent a year in Dublin as an apprentice at the Gate Theatre. After graduating from the Boston Museum School in 1961, she moved to New York, where she painted. In 1975, she began to produce a series of poetry programs for WBAI/Pacifica Radio.