Her engagement with poetry began in her youth. In 1958, at the age of sixteen, Marilyn Hacker left home and the Bronx High School of Science for an early acceptance to New York University. By 1961 she was living and working in near-poverty conditions and contributing to the youthful, artistic countercultures of the East Village of New York, then San Francisco and London. She married Samuel R. Delany on 22 August 1961, and in 1964 she finished her B.A. degree at New York University. Faking her age for an employment application, Hacker first worked as an editor at the science-fiction imprint Ace Books. Later, while attaining her earliest public poetic recognition, she performed whatever work was available--from post-office worker to employment counselor to textbook writer. For several notable years, 1971-1976, Hacker earned her living as an antiquarian bookseller in London. She and Delany had one child, Iva Alyxander Hacker-Delany, born in London in 1974. During that same year the couple separated, though they did not formally divorce until 1980.
Hacker's playful literary friendships with artists and writers from Tom Disch to Delany leave a paper trail of the type of energy she brought into the lives of those around her.
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