RACHEL TZVIA BACK is an English-language Israeli poet, translator, professor of literature, and peace activist. Her books of poetry and verse translations from Hebrew have received awards and recognitions, including the Times Literary Supplement Award, PEN Translation Prize, Finalist for the National Poetry Award in Translation, and Finalist for the Jewish Book Council Poetry Award. She is also the recipient of various fellowships, including the Brown Foundation Fellowship at the Dora Maar House (France).

 

Her most recent poetry collection, What Use is Poetry, the Poet is Asking, has been lauded as a “necessary, irreplaceable, urgent” (Chana Kronfeld), offering poems that “bristle with desperate hope” (Kazim Ali). 

​

Back lives in the Galilee, where her great great great grandfather settled in the 1830s.