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MR Announces Chametzky Prize Winner

The editors of the Massachusetts Review are proud to announce the winner of the inaugural Jules Chametzky Translation Prize: Rebecca Gaye Howell for her translation, with Husam Qaisi, of excerpts from Iraqi poet Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar before the Occupation/Hagar after the Occupation. This translation from Arabic into English appeared in the journal’s Winter 2010 issue (5104).

Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poems and translations have graced the pages of Ninth Letter, Ecotone, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poetry Daily. She holds a combined MFA in Poetry and Translation from Drew University and was a 2010-2011 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  

This fall, Alice James Books will publish Howell & Quaisi’s translation of Amal al-Jubouri's Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation

The Jules Chametzky Translation Prize, sponsored by the Massachusetts Review, is awarded annually to the best poem or prose translation published in our pages. Judges for this year's award were MR's translation editors, Ellen Doré Watson and Edwin Gentzler, along with this year's outside judge, Thalia Pandiri, editor of the translation journal Metamorphoses and professor in the Classics department at Smith College.

Jules Chametzky, in whose honor the prize is named, was the founding editor of the Massachusetts Review in 1959 and served as co-editor until 2003.  He is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the author of From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cohen (1977) and Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Southern and Jewish Literature (1986), and co-editor, with Sidney Kaplan, of Black & White in American Culture: An Anthology from The Massachusetts Review, among other works. Among his awards and honors is the Melus Award for Lifetime Contributions to Ethnic Studies (1995) and a Chancellor's Medal (1990) for distinguished teaching and scholarship.

Click here to view the winning translation!


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