Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is a celebrated contemporary American poet, essayist, and critic whose work occupies a distinctive space at the intersection of personal history, cultural memory, and formal innovation. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, to a Norwegian-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Rekdal has consistently drawn on her mixed-race heritage, her experiences as a woman navigating multiple cultural identities, and her deep engagement with literature and the visual arts. She holds degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Toronto and is a professor of English at the University of Utah, where she has taught for many years.

Her poetry is notable for its extraordinary formal range — she moves fluidly between lyric meditation, documentary poetics, and hybrid essay-poem forms — and for its unflinching confrontation with difficult subject matter, including racial violence, sexual trauma, grief, and the politics of cultural appropriation. Her collection Nightingale (2019) is a sweeping reckoning with the history of sexual violence, organized around Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale and the myth of Philomela, and was widely praised as one of the most ambitious and searching poetry collections of recent years. West: A Translation (2023) extends her documentary and investigative impulses through a meditation on Chinese immigration and the American West, drawing on historical archives, photographs, and family history. Her essay collection Appropriate: A Provocation (2021) ignited a national conversation about cultural appropriation in the literary arts.

Earlier collections, including The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) and Animal Eye (2012), which won the Balcones Poetry Prize, established her as a poet of formidable intellectual and emotional resources. Rekdal has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, among others. She served as Utah’s Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2022, during which time she developed the West Reads and Mapping Literary Utah public humanities projects.

Rekdal is also the author of the essay collections The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee and Intimate, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, and numerous other publications. She is one of the most intellectually rigorous and morally serious poets at work in contemporary American literature, and her influence on how poets think about history, identity, and form continues to grow.