Paisley Rekdal, poet laureate of Utah, to speak April 27

The 2022 River Reading will welcome Paisley Rekdal, poet laureate of Utah, who will read from her work April 27.

The reading will begin at 5 p.m. in the auditorium of the Olin Center. The event is free and open to the public.

The River Readings at Augustana brings literary artists to campus each year from around the country. These writers of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction meet with students in class or other venues to discuss their work and careers.

Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of "West: A Translation," as well as the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City.

In 2017, she was named Utah's Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Laureate Fellowship. 

She is the author of a book of essays, "The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,"  the hybrid photo-text memoir, "Intimate," and five books of poetry

Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, "The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam." A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid's Metamorphoses, was published in 2019 and won the Washington State Book Award.

"Appropriate: A Provocation," which examines cultural appropriation, was published by W.W. Norton in February 2021.  Rekdal was the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards.

Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.