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Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, librettist, and editor. Her work has received critical acclaim from such outlets as The Los Angeles Times, Poetry London (U.K.), Asymptote, Limelight (AUS), Publisher’s Weekly, MINT (India), Classic FM (U.K.), and The Kenyon Review, as well as Best Book of the Year honors from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Banipal Prize (U.K.), Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, The Millions, Burnaway, Ms. Magazine, and others. Her books include two novels-in-verse: American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017), and Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013); and two translations: El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale (Texas Tech University Press, 2024), poems by Claudia Prado; and Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), poems by Amal al-Jubouri. Both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution.

In 2019, Howell was named a United States Artists Fellow in Poetry. Among her other honors are The Carson McCullers Fellowship, 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, where she now serves as an elected member of the Writing Committee. Her genre-bending work has gained support from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology; in 2022, she was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

As a librettist, Howell collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance. Together they have written the following. Interglow, a quarantine meditation commissioned, premiered, and regularly performed by Salastina Los Angeles (February 12, 2021), (A Piece of Sky Music - ASCAP, 2022). 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). And, A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press, 2022), an interfaith carol cycle regularly 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 University Press Music, 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 December 04, 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 a developmental editor, Howell has steered titles that received the NAACP Image Award, the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow Selection, NPR’s Best Book of the Year, and other honors. From 2014-2024, Howell served as the Poetry Editor for the Oxford American, the second in the magazine’s history. In this role, she commissioned and curated a new profile of Southern poetics, featuring writers like Nikki Giovanni, A.E. Stallings, Tyehimba Jess, Major & Didi Jackson, C.D. Wright, Fady Joudah, and Nathaniel Mackey; the magazine received honors like the National Magazine Award for General Excellence and the Whiting Award during Howell’s tenure. In 2023 Howell published What Things Cost: an anthology for the people, which she co-edited with Ashley M. Jones & Emily Jalloul (University Press of Kentucky). Called “the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century,” the book received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and critical praise from outlets like Book Riot, Scalawag Magazine, and Bitter Southerner; Foreword Reviews named What Things Cost the INDIES GOLD Anthology of the Year.

Rebecca Gayle Howell makes her home between Central Kentucky and Northwest Arkansas, where she serves as an Associate Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She presents for communities 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. 

Howell’s next book, Erase Genesis, will be released in Fall 2025 by Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press.