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 twenty-first 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.