What Things Cost

Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of American Purgatory and Render /An Apocalypse, and the translator of Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Nautilus Awards, Best Translated Book Awards, The Weatherford Awards, The Banipal Prize, Book Riot, The Rumpus, Foreword Reviews, Library Journal, and Burnaway, and both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. Among Howell's awards is the United States Artists Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Sexton Prize, the Carson McCullers Fellowship, and two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Howell is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Translation for the University of Arkansas MFA program and the longtime Poetry Editor for The Oxford American, where she and her colleagues received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Her most recent release is A Winter Breviary, written by Howell and composed by Reena Esmail, broadcast in part by the BBC and just published by Oxford University Press. Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the author of three poetry collections: Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! (on the longlist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary's College of Maryland. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargeant Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020, and she was a guest editor of POETRY magazine in 2021. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and in the Low Residency MFA program at Converse University. She co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.