Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back is an English-language American-Israeli poet, translator and professor of literature.

Biography

Born in Buffalo, New York, Rachel Tzvia Back was raised in the U.S. and Israel. The seventh generation of her family in Israel, she returned to the country in 1980. She has lived in the Galilee, in the north of the country, since 2000. Back studied at Yale University, Temple University, and received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a professor of English literature and head of the graduate English track at Oranim Academic College.
From 1995 to 2000, Back was the Israeli Academic and Administrative Director of the Wesleyan and Brown Universities Overseas Program in Israeli and Palestinian Studies, based in Jerusalem.

Literary career

Back's most recent poetry collection, What Use is Poetry, the Poet is Asking, was published by Shearsman Books in March 2019.
A noted and award-winning translator of Hebrew verse, Back translated of the poetry of Israeli poet Tuvia Ruebner in In the Illuminated Dark: Select Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. Her translations of preeminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama were awarded a PEN Translation Grant, and the collection On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg, was shortlisted for the TLS-Risa Domb/Porjes Award in 2019. Back was also the editor and primary translator of the English edition of the groundbreaking anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry, ''Night, Morning: Selected Poems of Hamutal Bar Yosef and work collected in The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poetry from Antiquity to the Present and Hebrew Writers on Writing.
In 2015, Back was a finalist for the National Literary Translation Award in Poetry and the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry for the collection In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner. That same year, Back delivered the Stronach Lecture at the University of Berkeley California, an address titled: "'This Bequest of Wings': On Teaching Poetry in a Region of Conflict."
In 2002, Back's critical monograph Led by Language: the Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe'', was published by University of Alabama Press.

Grants & awards

2019
2016
2015
2015
2012
2012 Translation Grant from the Rabinovich Foundation
2008 Fundación Valparaíso Writer's Residence Award
2006 Scholar's Travel Grant from the Ford Foundation
2006 Research Grant from the Sherman Institute
2005 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award
2005 PEN Translation Grant
2005 Blue Mountain Artists Residence Fellowship
2000 Allan Bronfman Prize for Academic Excellence, Hebrew U.
1996 Absorption Minister's Prize for Immigrant Writers

Works

Poetry

What Use is Poetry, the Poet is Asking
A Messenger Comes
On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 Azimuth
Chapbooks: The Buffalo Poems & Litany

Translations

Now at the Threshold: The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner
On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg
In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry Night, Morning: Poems by Hamutal Bar Yosef Lea Goldberg: Selected Poems & Drama

Critical work

''Led by Language: the Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe''