Rachel Tzvia Back

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

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 (The Feminist Press, 1999) and Hebrew Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2008).

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.