Tina Howe

Tina Howe
Howe at the 2015 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony, June 2015
Born	(1937-11-21) November 21, 1937 (age 79) New York, New York
Occupation	playwright
Period	1970s -
Genre	plays

Tina Howe (born November 21, 1937) is an American playwright. In a career that spans more than four decades, Howe's best-known works include Museum, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances and Pride's Crossing.

Her plays have won numerous awards, including the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play for Pride's Crossing, which was also a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.Coastal Disturbances was nominated for the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play.

Howe comes from a literary family. Her grandfather, Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe published over 50 books, winning the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1925. Her father Quincy Howe, wrote and broadcast the evening news on CBS radio from 1942–47, and then on ABC TV. He was the author of the 3-volume history, A World History of Our Own Times. Her uncle, Mark DeWolfe Howe taught constitutional law at Harvard and was Oliver Wendell Holmes’ law clerk and biographer. Her aunt, Helen Howe, was a successful monologist and novelist.

Howe's family placed an emphasis on its members' reading and writing: "Thanksgivings and family occasions were always about, 'What are you reading, what are you writing, what are you working on, what poetry are you interested in?'" When Howe was ill with hepatitis, her father visited her every day in the hospital, reading James Joyce's Ulysses to her during his lunch break.

Howe graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York in 1959. As an undergraduate, she wrote her first play, Closing Time, directed by her classmate, Jane Alexander, who also acted in it.