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Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor of place-based literature. Her books include American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017) and Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013), as well as Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), an English-language translation of Amal al-Jubouri's Iraq War memoir-in-verse. Howell’s work has received critical acclaim from such outlets as The Los Angeles Times, Poetry London (U.K.), The Courier-Journal, Asymptote, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Millions, Arts ATL, MINT (India), and The Kenyon Review. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Banipal Prize (U.K.), The Millions, Book Riot, The Rumpus, and Ms. magazine, and both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution.

Howell is the recipient of a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship. Among her other honors are The Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers and Musicians from the Carson McCullers Center, the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. Howell is also the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2010-2011, 2014-2015), where she now serves as an elected member of the Writing Committee. Her genre-bending work is often underpinned by extensive documentary research, merging fiction, verse, and realism, gaining support from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

In addition to publishing, Howell collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance. Together they have written: Interglow, a quarantine meditation commissioned and premiered by Salastina Los Angeles (February 12, 2021), and published by A Piece of Sky Music (ASCAP). Say Your Name, a suffrage-rights cantata premiered by Amherst College featuring conductor Arianne Abela, soprano soloist Sherezade Panthaki, and the Amherst College Choir and Orchestra (November 5, 2022), and published by A Piece of Sky Music (ASCAP). A Winter Breviary, an eco-carol song cycle published by Oxford University Press and performed by such choirs as Voces8, The Sixteen, the Yale Ensemble, and Kathmandu Chorale. The Gesualdo Six recorded A Winter Breviary for Choral Music from Oxford with the Gesualdo Six (Oxford UP, 2022) and St. Martin’s Voices recorded the work as the title tracks for A Winter Breviary: Choral Works for Christmas (Resonus, 2023). The third song of the cycle, “The Unexpected Early Hour (Lauds - Raag Ahir Bhairav),” was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 2021 and  recorded by the BBC Singers then broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on December 24, 2021. It is also collected in Carols for Choirs 6 (Oxford University Press, 2023).

As an editor, Howell works to lift up place-based writing. Among these titles are award-winning books like Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s Even as We Breathe, Nomi Stone’s Kill Class, Julia Bouwsma’s Work by Bloodlight, and Crystal Wilkinson’s Perfect Black. Since 2014, Howell has served as Poetry Editor for The Oxford American, where she commissions and curates a new profile of Southern poetics—writers like Nikki Giovanni, Tarfia Faizullah, Tyehimba Jess, Major & Didi Jackson, Rosa Alcalá, C.D. Wright, Fady Joudah, Iliana Rocha, Kwame Dawes, and Nathaniel Mackey. Howell and her fellow editors received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2016. In 2021 and 2023, they were shortlisted for the CLMP Firecracker Award, and in 2023 they received the Whiting Award. In 2023 Howell also released What Things Cost, co-edited with Ashley M. Jones and Emily Jalloul. The collection has been called “the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century,” receiving a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and critical praise from outlets like Poets & Writers, Bitter Southerner, Ms. magazine, and The Southern Review of Books. Featuring writers like Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown, What Things Cost is published by University Press of Kentucky, with all proceeds benefiting The Poor People’s Campaign.

Rebecca Gayle Howell makes her home in Northwest Arkansas, where she serves on faculty for the University of Arkansas MFA program as an Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation. She presents at venues like the Edinburgh Book Festival, the American Academy of Poets, No Kid Hungry, and the Galápagos International Poetry Festival, as well as wherever her work is taught. Her latest book is El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale, the bilingual edition of Claudia Prado’s novel-in-verse of Patagonia, translated by Howell—out now from Texas Tech University Press. Order here.