Rachel Tzvia Back

Rachel Tzvia Back (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Azimuth (Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2002), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999–2005 (Shearsman Books, 2007), A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012), and What Use is Poetry, the Poet is Asking (Shearsman Books, 2019). Many of her poems examine the devastating and seemingly endless cycles of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through open, investigative, and musically propelled forms. Back has stated that, for her, “the political always emanates from the most personal of places—from the heart, from the home.”

A noted translator of Hebrew verse, Back translated the work of preeminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press, 2005), which won a PEN Translation Grant, and On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg (Hebrew Union College Press, 2017). She also translated Now at the Threshold: The Last Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (HUC Press, 2020); and the first collection of Ruebner in English, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (HUC Press, 2014), which won the TLS Risa Dobm/Porjes Translation Award in 2016 and was a finalist for the 2015 National Translation Award in Poetry. She was also the primary translator of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (Excelsior Editions, 2009). Her critical work includes the monograph Led by Language: The Poetry and Poetics of Susan Howe (University of Alabama Press, 2002).

Back was born in Buffalo, New York, and spent her childhood between Buffalo and Jerusalem, where her grandfather was born and her father’s extended family lived. She studied at Yale University, Temple University in Philadelphia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she earned a PhD in English literature. She is a professor of English literature at Oranim College in the foothills of Haifa. She lives in Galilee where her great-great-great-grandfather settled in the 1830s before the family eventually made its way to Jerusalem.