Rebecca Gayle

Howell

Award Winning Poet

Translator, Editor & Professor

Travels from: Fayetteville, AR

“This galvanizing anthology of poetry and short prose highlights experiences of economic exploitation and finds common ground across the working class. The editors’ introduction contextualizes the anthology within a larger labor movement inspired by the Poor People’s Campaign popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968…This is a memorable and timely book.” — Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review

Rebecca Gayle Howell is an award-winning poet, translator, and editor of place-based literature. As the granddaughter of Appalachian subsistence farmers, she centers the hope that ecological, economic, and human rights can offer those living in vulnerable regions. Howell regularly presents to audiences at venues like the Edinburgh Book Festival, the American Academy of Poets, No Kid Hungry, Southern Foodways Alliance, The Berry Center, and the Galápagos International Poetry Festival.

Howell’s books include two novels in verse: American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017) and Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State UP, 2013), as well as two translations: El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale, a Patagonian migration narrative by Claudia Prado (Texas Tech UP, 2024) and Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), Amal al-Jubouri’s Iraq War memoir-in-verse. 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 Sexton Prize (U.K.), and The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (U.K.), and both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. In 2023 Howell released What Things Cost: an anthology for the people (UP of Kentucky), co-edited by Howell & Ashley M. Jones, with all proceeds benefiting The Poor People’s Campaign. Called “the first major anthology of labor writing in a century,” What Things Cost received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was named a Best Book of the Year by outlets like Ms. Magazine, Bitter Southerner, Book Riot, Southern Review of Books, and Poets & Writers.

Howell also collaborates with composer Reena Esmail to produce works for classical performance. Among their releases is A Winter Breviary, a series of interfaith eco-carols published by Oxford University Press (2022) and performed by such choirs as Voces8 (U.K.), The Los Angeles Master Chorale (U.S.), The Sixteen (U.K.), Kathmandu Chorale (Nepal), The BBC Singers (U.K.), Yale Ensemble (U.S.), and the Gesualdo Six (U.K.). A Winter Breviary has also been recorded twice in Great Britain, appearing on Choral Music from Oxford with the Gesualdo Six (2022) and A Winter Breviary: Choral Works for Christmas by St. Martin’s Voices (2023).

In 2019 Howell was named a United States Artists Fellow in Poetry. 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. She 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 writing 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.

Since 2014, Howell has served as the poetry editor for The Oxford American, where she curates and commissions a new profile of Southern poetics. In 2016 she and her fellow editors received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and in 2023 they received the Whiting Award. A seventh-generation Kentuckian, Rebecca Gayle Howell makes her home in Northwest Arkansas, where she is a professor of poetry & translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program.

Rebecca Gayle's Featured Titles

The Belly of the Whale: Bilingual Edition (Desert Humanities)

Texas Tech University Press |

March 15, 2024

Spanish Poetry

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, against her will, is taken to that desert; here is revealed the thoughts of an orphan laborer; here, a chicken thief celebrates his sad prize.

In El interior de la ballena, Prado uses her page to privilege the often unseen and unheard, composing in silence as much as sound. When read together, the poems quilt a place, time, and lineage through a story of strong women, wounded and wounding men, and a rural and unforgiving landscape from which hardscrabble labor is the origin of survival.

El interior de la ballena | The belly of the whale is now rendered into English for the first time by award-winning poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell. In this completely bilingual edition, readers of either language can immerse themselves in Prado’s Patagonia, as well as this unique collaboration between Prado and Howell that begs us to ask if language itself is our endless migration.

Poetry

What Things Cost: an anthology for the people

University Press of Kentucky |

March 7, 2023

Poetry/Short Stories

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 led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. King’s last lesson―about the dangers of dividing working people―inspired the conversation gathered here by Jones and Howell.

Fifty-five years after the assassination of King, What Things Cost collects stories that are honest, provocative, and galvanizing, sharing the hidden costs of labor and laboring in the United States of America. Voices such as Sonia Sanchez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Silas House, Sonia Guiñansaca, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Victoria Chang, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Stern, and Jericho Brown weave together the living stories of the campaign’s broad swath of supporters, creating a literary tapestry that depicts the struggle and solidarity behind the work of building a more just America.

Class & Economic Inequality, Poetry, Short Stories

American Purgatory

Eyewear Publishing |

February 10, 2017

Poetry

Poetry. Winner of the 2016 Sexton Prize for Poetry (selected by Don Share of Poetry magazine), 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 that if 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 a truth about this place that indeed sets her free. Equal parts Dante and Cormac McCarthy, AMERICAN PURGATORY is a coming-of-age for capitalism written in the decade of tea-party terror.

Fantasy, Speculative & Science Fiction, Poetry

Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Poetry Center New Poetry)

Cleveland State University Poetry Center |

March 16, 2013

Poetry

Poetry. “To enter into these poems one must be fully committed, as the poet is, to seeing this world as it is, to staying with it, moment by moment, day by day. Yet these poems hold a dark promise: this is how you can do it, but you must be fully engaged, which means you must be fully awake, you must wake up inside it. As we proceed, the how-to of the beginning poems subtly transform, as the animals (or, more specifically, the livestock) we are engaging begin to, more and more, become part of us, literally and figuratively we enter inside of that which we devour.”—Nick Flynn

“This is the book you want with you in the cellar when the tornado is upstairs taking your house and your farm. It’s the book you want in the bomb shelter, and in the stalled car, in the kitchen waiting for the kids to come home, in the library when the library books are burned. Its instructions are clear and urgent. Rebecca Gayle Howell has pressed her face to the face of the actual animal world. She remembers everything we have forgotten. Read this! It’s not too late. We can start over from right here and right now.”—Marie Howe

“In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading RENDER how deeply I was handing everything over.”—Nikky Finney

Poetry

Writing Place, Writing Your Place

Trust Your Gut: Foodways, Family, & Memory

The Animals Know: Deep Ecology & Creaturely Membership

Writing Rural

Listening & Seeing: Docupoetics

Verse as Fiction: Informing and Exploring the Imaginary

Writing the Complicated South

Re/writing Myth & Interfaith Healing

All Poetry is Translation

Say Your Name. A suffrage rights cantata written by Rebecca Gayle Howell and composed by Reena Esmail (A Piece of Sky Music – ASCAP, 2022). West coast premiere: Kirkland Choral Society and Philharmonia Northwest. Seattle, WA. April 27, 2024.

“Rebecca Gayle Howell is an exceedingly generous workshop leader and compelling public speaker. We adored hosting Rebecca, as she went above and beyond to create a tight-knit community in her workshop and with her fellow faculty members. Her teaching style and creative work are top-notch!” — Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference, 2024

“In many cases, the speaker at such an event will read from their work, reply to a few questions, sign some books, and meet with their friends before returning home. But Professor Howell provided first an exceptional talk connecting her own writing with that of the conference’s namesake, then read movingly from her own work. Further, she entertained numerous questions, often engaging the speaker to discuss their own writing in a way that led one of the conference attendees to tell me, ‘She wanted dialogue.’ As if this were not enough, she spent another hour signing books and conversing with attendees. What’s more, the next morning she was on campus early to attend panel sessions and meet students with whom she had scheduled manuscript consultations. To say that I was surprised by all that she provided would be disingenuous, as I have known Professor Howell for over ten years and have never seen from her anything less than complete generosity of energy and spirit.” — University of Central Arkansas

“I always feel like Beall Poetry is sacred space — a time to stop the rushing of the world and listen to people who are thinking deeply about serious ideas and writing with the kind of beauty that can be solace. [Rebecca Gayle Howell was] such an integral part of creating that space this year with [her] wonderful reading and interactions with our students — thank you!” — Baylor University

“An amazing poet, inspiring activist, and an absolute joy to be around!” — Baylor University

“[Rebecca Gayle Howell] transformed our poetry time at the LGRWC into a spiritual journey — true, deep heart work. And in the process, [she] created such a sweet, supportive, bonded community. I am filled up and grateful.” — Poetry Workshop Attendee

“The workshops were instructive and memorable. [Rebecca Gayle Howell’s] face and body language, [her] tone of voice and words that are quotes to remember, [her] selection of the poems we read and discussed, [her] suggestions for poets and their work for our study and reflection, and [her] own reading offered me so much to go forward with. Renewed, inspired, and grateful.” — Poetry Workshop Attendee

“There’s an unexpected intimacy…a sense of the physicality of life, of death and of endurance, which in the end is all we have. Howell gets at all of this with precision, pitiless but not unfeeling, knee-deep, waist-deep in the world.” — The Los Angeles Times

“Every once in awhile, poetry needs to say to novels: I’ve been around longer, and I can tell stories better. Howell’s the kind of poet who can announce the apocalypse in a whisper.” — The Millions

“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.” — Alicia Ostriker, Chancellor Emeritus of the American Academy of Poets

“What makes this collection deeply compelling is its unrelenting use of narrative to sustain a totalising image of a plausible American apocalypse, such that each prose poem becomes an indispensable thread in a collection which is biblical in its scope.” — Poetry London

“This crushing book of poems came into my life at just the right moment: in the middle of personal upheaval and just a couple of days before the election.” Burnaway: Art of the South, 2016 Book of the Year

“American Purgatory is, to my mind, not only one of the finest books of the year, but one of those books that will be remembered and read long after the winds have vaporized us all.” — St. Louis Magazine

“In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel.” — Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner

“Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translation is stunning in how it creates a powerful, contemporary voice speaking to us directly with warmth and suffering, and yet also carries over the poems’ connection to Arabic literary traditions.” — Best Translated Book Awards, judge’s citation

“The best of poetry paired with the best of translations [achieves an] immediate bridge between cultures. It is a double gift.” — Hayden’s Ferry Review

“Taken together, these poems ask us to consider what work means to us, what work has done to us, how our bodies and minds have labored—for what, for whom? This anthology arrives in time to remind us, as Howell & Jones write, “Wealth does not have to be generated by suffering. It does not have to be this way.” — Scalawag Magazine

“I just left a union meeting in Franklin, Pennsylvania, where Ironworkers were thanking the rest of the labor movement for supporting them during a recent strike. At the core of solidarity is a mix of kindness and courage, rooted in shared vulnerability. And that’s exactly what I feel when I read What Things Cost. The stories, confessions, elegies, and authenticities in this book transcend generations and demographics, and feel just as familiar here in Franklin, Pennsylvania, as they will in every corner of every community where work happens.” — Stephen Cousins, National Field Director, AFL-CIO

“Poet and translator Rebecca Gayle Howell has transported Amal al-Jubouri’s moving cri de coeur across the precarious bridge between Arabic and English as well as the cultural, political, and ethical chasm separating Iraq and the United States. This is poetry necessary to our times, and we owe the makers of this work in English an enormous debt of gratitude.” — Carolyn Forché

“The best of poetry paired with the best of translations [achieves an] immediate bridge between cultures. It is a double gift.” — Hayden’s Ferry Review

“Howell, entrusting herself to al-Jubouri’s vision, has written beautiful, moving, and passionate poems in English that try to welcome the stranger among us, letting the one our nation has called enemy speak in our own tongue.” — Asymptote

Rebecca’s Events Link

Honors, Awards & Recognition

Names INDIES GOLD Anthology of the Year (What Things Cost, 2023)
United States Artists Fellow
Carson McCullers Fellow
Fine Arts Work Center Fellow
Kentucky Arts Council Fellow
Best Translated Book Award, finalist
The Sexton Prize (U.K.)
Pushcart Prize
Nautilus Book Award
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, finalist (U.K.)
Small Press Distribution Bestseller of the Decade