Rebecca Gayle Howell

Rebecca Gayle Howell is a poet, a translator, and an editor of place-based writing. Nick Flynn selected her debut collection, Render / An Apocalypse (2013), for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize. It earned critical acclaim from outlets including the Los Angeles Times, The Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus and was a bestselling book of the decade for Small Press Distribution. Alicia Ostriker reviewed Render / An Apocalypse for its 10th anniversary:

America has a rich literature of farm life, its pleasures, struggles and tragedies—most of it in the form of fiction, from Cather’s My Antonia to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Rural life has always inspired poetry as well, much of it romantic and sentimental, some of it striving for realism. Recent superb poets of farm life are Wendell Berry and Maxine Kumin. But there has never been anything as trenchant, as fierce, as Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse.

Howell is also the author of American Purgatory (2017), which Don Share selected for Great Britain’s Sexton Prize and The Millions and Poetry London named a must-read. Howell’s other books include her translation of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (2011), a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (2023), coedited with Ashley M. Jones and selected as a best book of the year by Ms., the Southern Review of Books, and Poets & Writers. 

In addition to publishing, Howell collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance, including the widely performed A Winter Breviary (2022), a set of three interfaith carols that trace a journey through the dark woods on the solstice in search of light. It has been performed in the UK and US by many choirs, including Voces8, the BBC Singers, the Yale Choral Ensemble, The Sixteen, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and The Gesualdo Six, who also recorded it for Choral Music from Oxford with The Gesualdo Six in 2022.

Howell’s genre-bending work is often underpinned by extensive documentary research, merging fiction, verse, and realism. She is concerned with the spiritual consequences of extraction, centering deep ecology, intersectional feminism, and empathic imagination as sources of hope. Of Howell’s work, Naomi Shihab Nye writes, “With striking passion, revelatory insight, eerie visionary turnabouts, haunting threads of hymnology, and a giant gift of precision and sensitive care, Rebecca Gayle Howell creates an unforgettably potent world in her poems.” Her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Carson McCullers Center, the Kentucky Arts Council, and United States Artists. Howell is the longtime poetry editor for the Oxford American and a professor of poetry and translation for the MFA at the University of Arkansas. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky.