Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal
Occupation	Professor, University of Utah, Goddard College
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Washington (BA) Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (MA) University of Michigan (MFA)
Genre	Poetry
Website
Official website

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet and Poet Laureate of Utah.[1] She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, and six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2024 The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council. She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio,[2] among others. She was a recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.[3]

Early life and education

She grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian father. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington, as well as a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto for Medieval Studies and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan.[4]

Career

Rekdal is a professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and at Goddard College's low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program in Port Townsend, Washington.[5][6] She is also credited with having created the community web project Mapping Salt Lake City.[7]

Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine,[8] Nerve, New England Review,[9] The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, NPR,[2] Ploughshares,[10][11] Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West,[12] The Virginia Quarterly Review,[13] and Blackbird.[14]

She was appointed Poet Laureate of Utah in May 2017.[1]

In 2018, Rekdal was awarded the Narrative Prize for a trilogy of poems, “Quiver,” “Telling the Wasps,” and “The Olive Tree at Vouves,” which combine "Keatsian lyricism with a mortal questioning of the nature of memory in the modern age."[15]

Works

Poetry

• A Crash of Rhinos. University of Georgia Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-8203-2273-5.
• Six Girls Without Pants, Eastern Washington University Press, 2002, ISBN 9780910055826
• The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. University of Pittsburgh Press. 25 February 2007. ISBN 978-0-8229-9083-3.
• Animal Eye. University of Pittsburgh Press. 26 February 2012. ISBN 978-0-8229-7838-1.[16][17]
• Imaginary Vessels. Copper Canyon Press, 2017 ISBN 1556594976
• Nightingale. Copper Canyon Press. 7 May 2019. ISBN 978-1-5565-9567-7
• West: A Translation. Copper Canyon Press. 2 May 2023. ISBN 9781556596568

Prose

• The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In. Vintage Books. 18 December 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-42908-7.
• Intimate: An American Family Photo Album, Tupelo Press, 2012, ISBN 9781936797080
• The Broken Country, University of Georgia Press, 2017, ISBN 9780820351179
• Appropriate: A Provocation, W.W. Norton, 2021, ISBN 978-1-324-00358-8
• Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: How to Read and Write Poetry Forensically, W.W. Norton, 2024, ISBN 978-0-393-88198-1

References

1. "U. professor named Utah poet laureate". Archived from the original on May 11, 2017. Retrieved 11 May 2017.
2. "NewsPoet: Paisley Rekdal Writes The Day In Verse". NPR.org. 10 July 2012. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
3. "paisley rekdal home". paisleyrekdal. Retrieved 2020-04-04.
4. "Paisley Rekdal". Poetry Foundation. 2020-04-03. Retrieved 2020-04-04.
5. "PAISLEY REKDAL". utah.edu. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
6. "2007 Faculty". www.writersatwork.org.
7. "Mapping Salt Lake City | Stories, Memories & History - Home". www.mappingslc.org. Retrieved 2020-04-04.
8. "Paisley Rekdal". Narrative Magazine. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
9. "When It Is Over It Will Be Over" (PDF). www.nereview.com. 2014. Retrieved 2019-08-08.
10. "Read By Author". pshares.org. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
11. "Bats". poets.org. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
12. "Paisley Rekdal, "Canzone"". webdelsol.com. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
13. "Paisley Rekdal". vqronline.org. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
14. "Paisley Rekdal, Blackbird". vcu.edu. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
15. "Paisley Rekdal Wins 2018 Narrative Prize". Narrative Magazine. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
16. Phillips, Emilia (Summer 2013). "Becoming Feral: a Review of Paisley Rekdal's Animal Eye". Kenyon Review. Retrieved 19 February 2014. Animal Eye reminds us that we don't know the limits of empathy, that we can't presume we're the only beings who recognize the familiar in another's gaze. What we recognize as familiar continually changes as we change, and we change by looking. And what is looking but the taking in of reflected light?
17. Farmer, Jonathan (April 1, 2012). "Beauty and Violence". Slate. Retrieved 19 February 2014. In acknowledging the disappointing facts of our existence and singing her way into its amazement, she has created poetry that lives alongside the misery we sometimes witness—and sometimes cause.

External links

• Official website
• Official Twitter Account
• University of Utah faculty profile of Paisley Rekdal
• "Of Perspective and Perception": An Interview with Paisley Rekdal (Interview Series, The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress)
• Animal Eye by Paisley Rekdal – Coal Hill Review