Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker (born November 27, 1942) is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English at the City College of New York.

Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award,Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.

She was born and raised in Bronx, New York, the only child of Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a management consultant and her mother a teacher. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, where she met her future husband Samuel R. Delany, who would become a well-known science-fiction writer. She enrolled at New York University at the age of fifteen (B.A., 1964). To marry, Hacker and Delany traveled from New York to Detroit, Michigan in August 1961. Delany explained in his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water the reason that they married in Detroit was that, because of their ages and because he was African-American and she was Caucasian, "there were only two states in the union where we could legally wed. The closest one was Michigan." They settled in New York's East Village. Their daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, was born in 1974. Hacker and Delany, after being separated for many years, were divorced in 1980, but remain friends. Hacker identifies as lesbian, and Delany has identified as a gay man since adolescence. Their daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, was a theatre director in New York City for a decade before becoming a physician.

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