Rebecca Gayle Howell (Kentucky, 1975) is a writer, translator, and editor of place-based literature. 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.
As an editor, Howell works to lift up place-based writing. From 2014-2024, Howell served as the Poetry Editor for The Oxford American. During this time she commissioned and curated a new profile of Southern poetics. 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. Howell’s anthology, What Things Cost: an anthology for the people, co-edited with Ashley M. Jones & Emily Jalloul, has been called “the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century.” In 2024, Foreword Reviews named What Things Cost the INDIES GOLD Anthology.
Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013) · American Purgatory (Eyewear Publishing, 2017) · A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press, 2022) · What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (University Press of Kentucky, 2023)
Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011) · The Belly of the Whale (Texas Tech University Press, 2024)
What Things Cost: an anthology for the people is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today's economy.
In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a "multiracial coalition of the working poor." King hoped this coalition would become the next civil rights movement but he was assassinated before he could see it emerge as the Poor People's Campaign, now ...
The three movements of A Winter Breviary are entitled: 'We look for you', 'The year's midnight', and 'The unexpected early hour'. The movements are each based on an Indian classical Raag: Raag Hamsadhwani, Raag Malkauns, and Raag Ahir Bhairav, respectively. The texts, by poet Rebecca Gayle Howell, are linked to the Christian services of Evensong, Matins, and Lauds, and are eco-carols written from the perspective of a different point in time-evening, midnight, and daybreak-using nature to explore a different part of the Christmas story. The first two movements have a serene and ...
American Purgatory is a story of the working class, a dystopia set in a near-future United States marked by severe drought, herbicidal warfare, and a totalitarian climate of poverty. This purgatory is populated by those who believe if that they work hard enough, they will be set free. Against this backdrop, three unlikely characters begin a journey that will take them away from work, belief, and even each other, until the protagonist uncovers the truth about this place and the people in it—a truth that indeed sets her free. Equal parts Dante and Cormac McCarthy, American Purgatory is ...
Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Render /An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013), which was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize and was a 2014 finalist for ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year. She is also the translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011). Among her awards are two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and a Pushcart Prize. Native to Kentucky, Howell is the poetry ...
This critically-acclaimed translation of Iraqi author Amal al-Jubouri contextualizes America's occupation of Iraq through the Qur'an's story of Hagar. Complementary pairs of poems portray life before and after the war. This work simultaneously mirrors Hagar's desperate running between Safa and Marwah, as we pace frantically between pre- and post-occupation Iraq—the poet begging in vain for poetry not to abandon her people.
In this South American epic, poet Claudia Prado imagines her ancestors’ nineteenth-century migration from the Basque Country into Argentina and, ultimately, southward into the oceanic desert. At its original publication in 2000, El interior de la ballena received Argentina's National Fund for the Arts prize, helping usher in a poetics of Patagonia. Prado's poetry honors her homeland's wide open desert and its ancient silences, offering a vision that braids intergenerational migrations into a chorus of monologues and intimate voices, all looking for home. Here speaks a woman who, ...