The Sewanee Review is pleased to announce that Rebecca Gayle Howell is the recipient of the 2025 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, literary translator, librettist, and editor. Her books include two novels in verse— “Render / An Apocalypse and American Purgatory” —both of which were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. She translated Patagonia poet Claudia Prado’s “El Interior de la Ballena” and Amal al-Jubouri’s “Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation.” Howell’s work has received critical acclaim from such outlets as the Los Angeles Times, Poetry London, Publisher’s Weekly, and the Kenyon Review. She is an Advanced Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program, and she also serves on faculty for the University of the South’s Sewanee School of Letters. From 2014 to 2024, she was the Poetry Editor for the Oxford American. Her sixth book, “Erase Genesis,” will be released this November by Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press.

University Vice Chancellor Dr. Robert Pearigen and Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross will present Howell with the Aiken Taylor Award this October at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. As part of this year’s award celebration, poet Corey Van Landingham will lecture on Howell’s poetry. Van Landingham is the author of three books of poetry: “Antidote,” “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens,” and “Reader, I.” She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois.

We hope you will join us this October to celebrate this poet and her exceptional body of work.