Rebecca Gayle Howell is a poet writing new myths for climate change. Her genre-rousing work has received international critical acclaim from outlets like Poetry London, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Los Angeles Times, and she has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Among her awards are the Carson McCullers Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2019, she became the first Kentucky writer to be named a United States Artists Fellow. In 2025, she received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.  

Howell is an Associate Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She also serves on faculty for the University of the South’s Sewanee School of Letters Low-Residency MFA Program and as an elected member of the Fine Arts Work Center’s Writing Committee. She is a seventh-generation Kentuckian.

Her latest is Erase Genesis, just out from Bridwell Press. Featured by outlets like Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Orion, and America Magazine, Erase Genesis is a book-length sequence that reimagines the creation myth for our climate change age. Order your copy here.

Poetry & Translation

Howell’s books include Render / An Apocalypse (Ohio UP, 2013) and American Purgatory (BSPG, 2017), both novels-in-verse. Render was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize and American Purgatory was selected by Don Share for Great Britain’s Sexton Prize. Both books also received wide critical acclaim and were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. Render was also featured in Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2020), and for its 10th anniversary, Alicia Ostriker wrote a new foreword. Since its publication, Render has gone on to become a classic in climate-change literature, being taught and anthologized internationally.

As a translator, Howell collaborates with living women poets who write place. This work includes El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale (Texas Tech UP, 2024), poems by Claudia Prado; and Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), poems by Amal al-Jubouri. El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale was published in a completely bilingual edition and praised by Hablemos, escritoras for setting a new standard for publication equity. Hagar received the Jules Chametzky Prize and received critical praise in the U.S., the Middle East, and India. It was also a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the Banipal Prize (U.K.), and was named a Best Poetry Book of the Year by Library Journal. 

Howell’s other honors include the Kentucky Arts Council Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Her latest book is Erase Genesis (Bridwell Press, 2026), a book-length sequence that reimagines the creation myth for our climate change age. Erase Genesis has been featured by outlets like Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Orion, and America Magazine. Order your copy here.

MUSIC

Howell collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance.

Esmail & Howell’s most recent work is Wir, a lyric elegy for the quiet we now risk losing. As Howell prays for its return, she weaves her own English poetry with German fragments from Paul Celan, a poet survivor of the Holocaust who knew all too well the dangers caused by constant din. Composed by Reena Esmail for only violin and voice, accompanied by nothing but the silence the piece seeks. Poly-vocal, bilingual, and minimal, Wir was commissioned by violinist Hilary Hahn and baritone Matthias Goerne for their 2026 US tour.

Howell & Esmail’s A Winter Breviary (Oxford UP, 2022) is an eco-carol suite that tells a story of walking through the dark woods on solstice night, looking for the light. It is annually performed by such choirs as the The Sixteen, the Yale Ensemble, the Kathmandu Chorale, Voces8 at Wigmore Hall, and the National Symphonic Chorus at Carnegie Hall. Recordings of A Winter Breviary include Choral Music from Oxford with the Gesualdo Six (Oxford Music, 2022), A Winter Breviary: Choral Works for Christmas by St. Martin’s Voices (Resonus, 2023), and The Wise Men and the Star: A Christmas Collection by The Sixteen (CORO, 2025). The third song of the cycle, “The Unexpected Early Hour (Lauds - Raag Ahir Bhairav),” was premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in December 04, 2021 and broadcast by the BBC Singers on Radio 3 on December 24, 2021. It is also collected in Carols for Choirs 6 (Oxford UP, 2023) and will appear in The Oxford Book of Easy Flexible Carols in 2027.

Esmail & Howell have also written Interglow, a quarantine meditation commissioned by Salastina Los Angeles (February 12, 2021), (A Piece of Sky Music - ASCAP, 2021), and Say Your Name, a suffrage-rights cantata commissioned and premiered on the East Coast by Amherst College (November 5, 2022) and premiered on the West Coast by the Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest (April 27, 2024), (A Piece of Sky Music - ASCAP, 2023).