Paisley Rekdal is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Nightingale (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), a book described as “riveting poetic alchemy” that rewrites many of the myths of transformation central to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These poems—intimate, searing, and literary all at once—have been praised by poet Major Jackson as work “deeply marked by a sensate, near terrestrial, relationship to language such that she refreshes and renews debates about beauty, suffering, and art for the 21st-century reader." Rekdal’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets‘ Poets Laureate Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. In 2017, Rekdal was named Poet Laureate of Utah, and she will serve as the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020. Appropriate: A Provocation, a book-length essay examining cultural appropriation, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Program for the Study of Women and Gender.
