About:

Rebecca Gayle Howell

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Render /An Apocalypse, a finalist for ForeWord’s Book of the Year, and the translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s verse memoir of the Iraq War, Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation, a finalist for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award. Among Howell’s honors are fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Carson McCullers Center, and the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as a Pushcart Prize; since 2014, she has edited poetry for the Oxford American. Howell’s latest book, American Purgatory, was selected by Don Share for The Sexton Prize; Eyewear Publishing released the book to both the United Kingdom and the United States in early 2017. Native to Kentucky, Howell is the James Still Writer-in-Residence at the Hindman Settlement School.

Praise for Rebecca Gayle Howell’s latest book:

American Purgatory is a FORCE of a book. With striking passion, revelatory insight, eerie visionary turn-abouts, haunting threads of hymnology, and a giant gift of precision and sensitive care, Rebecca Gayle Howell creates an unforgettably potent world in her poems – labor so often lived and borne, so rarely described.  — Naomi Shihab Nye

What I can’t stop thinking about, reading Rebecca Gayle Howell’s haunting American Purgatory, are the ways our almost (but not quite) incalculably extractive lives, born of our extractive imaginations, will wither every last thing to dust if we don’t confront them. And it makes me wonder how we will confront them. This book feels like one of the ways. — Ross Gay

In scriptural cadences and the earthen voice of a woman laboring under a sky of pesticides, Rebecca Gayle Howell imagines, with lyric ferocity and razor perception, a near-future dystopia lived by “persons held to service and labor,” in the wide, ruined fields of industrial agribusiness. It is a world of scarce water and thirsty cotton, with strong echoes of the shameful past of abduction and enslavement that built the wealth of the United States. In American Purgatory we meet Brother Slade, The Kid, a man called Little, and the chemically deformed “Brutes.” Howell is our twenty-first century Virgil, waving “the flag of warning,” on the precipice of a ruined world. Our world. 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. This is a poetic work for our moment and the time is now. — Carolyn Forché

Interviews with Rebecca Gayle Howell:

The Adroit Journal, Issue Thirteen: A Conversation with Rebecca Gayle Howell

Interview – Still: The Journal

Accents Publishing Blog | “The Secrets Animals Keep”

Poetry:

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/149-five-poems

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/58171