Bio

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” the hybrid-genre photo-text memoir “Intimate,” and four books of poetry: “A Crash of Rhinos,” “Six Girls Without Pants,” “The Invention of the Kaleidoscope” and “Animal Eye,” a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize. Her newest book of poems is “Imaginary Vessels”; a book-length essay, “The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam” is forthcoming in 2017. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the 2016 AWP 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 and the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, and 2017), and on National Public Radio. She teaches at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of the community web project Mapping Salt Lake City. She was named Utah's poet laureate in May 2017.