Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee;  a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants,  The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye, which was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.

Born and raised in Seattle, Rekdal has lived in over six countries, including France, South Korea, Ireland, and Vietnam, and has currently spent the past ten years living and writing in Salt Lake City where she teaches at the University of Utah.  Her interest in the history and evolution of the West and has led her to create a narrative web “atlas” of Salt Lake City called “Mapping Salt Lake City” a community-written archive of Salt Lake City’s neighborhoods and people that documents the city’s changes through art, critical and creative literature, personal maps, and multimedia projects.

Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, two inclusions in the Best American Poetry series, and various state arts-council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from the New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio, among others.