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Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, librettist, and editor. Her books include: El interior de la ballena / The Belly of the whale (Texas Tech University Press, 2024), a novel-in-verse by Patagonia poet Claudia Prado, translated by Howell; What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (University Press of Kentucky, 2022), co-edited with Ashley M. Jones & Emily Jalloul; American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017), a novel-in-verse by Howell; Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013), a novel-in-verse by Howell; and Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), an Iraq War memoir-in-verse by Amal al-Jubouri, translated by Howell. 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. 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 featuring conductor Arianne Abela, soprano soloist Sherezade Panthaki, and the Amherst College Choir and Orchestra (November 5, 2022) and premiered on the West Coast by the Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest in Seattle, WA, featuring soloists Stacey Mastrian and Danielle Reutter-Harrah and introduced by Charles Douglas III, Executive Director of Common Power (April 27, 2024), (A Piece of Sky Music - ASCAP, 2023). 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 an editor, Howell works to lift up place-based writing. From 2014-2024, Howell served as the Poetry Editor for The Oxford American, the second in the magazine’s history. During this time she commissioned and curated a new profile of Southern poetics, featuring writers like Nikki Giovanni, Tarfia Faizullah, Tyehimba Jess, Major & Didi Jackson, Rosa Alcalá, C.D. Wright, Fady Joudah, Iliana Rocha, Kwame Dawes, and Nathaniel Mackey. 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.” Featuring writers like Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown, What Things Cost received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and critical praise from outlets like Poets & Writers, Bitter Southerner, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Scalawag Magazine, and The Southern Review of Books. In 2024, Foreword Reviews named What Things Cost the INDIES GOLD Anthology of the Year. All proceeds from the book benefit The Poor People’s Campaign, in perpetuity.

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.