“The clear-eyed courage at work here reminds me of the honest power of C.D. Wright. She would recognize in Howell a sister poet.”
—Carolyn Forché
Rebecca Gayle Howell is a genre-rousing 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, and she has been translated into Spanish and German. Howell’s 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.), Poets & Writers, Ms. Magazine, The Millions, Library Journal, Bitter Southerner, and others. Among her other awards are the United States Artists Fellowship, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, the Kentucky Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Howell makes her home between Central Kentucky and Northwest Arkansas, where she 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. Howell 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.
Her next book, Erase Genesis, will be released in Fall 2025 by Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press.
AS A WRITER & TRANSLATOR
Howell’s books include Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013) and American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017), both climate change novels-in-verse that were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. These books received praise from outlets like The Millions, Poetry London (U.K.), Kenyon Review, Burnaway, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Courier Journal, The Rumpus, ArtsATL, and Los Angeles Times. Since its publication, Render has become a classic in the genre, continuing to be taught and anthologized internationally.
As a literary 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 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. Hagar received the Jules Chametzky Prize, was 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 genre-bending work often involves extensive documentary research, which 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 a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Her next book, Erase Genesis, will be released in Fall 2025 by Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press.
AS A LIBRETTIST
Howell collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance, including A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press, 2022), an interfaith eco-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).
Esmail and Howell have also written Interglow, a quarantine meditation commissioned, premiered, and regularly performed by Salastina Los Angeles (February 12, 2021), (A Piece of Sky Music - ASCAP, 2022), 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).
AS AN EDITOR
Since 2014, Howell has worked as freelance editor, serving large and small presses, magazines, and private clients. Over the years, she 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, the Julia Child Foundation Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 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 Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Southern Review of Books, Scalawag Magazine, and Bitter Southerner. Foreword Reviews named What Things Cost the INDIES GOLD Anthology of the Year.
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