Poet Paisley Rekdal to speak virtually with TU students Nov. 9
Post Published On:Renowned poet Paisley Rekdal will visit Thomas University to discuss her work and the art of poetry on Tuesday, Nov. 9, as part of the Georgia Poetry Circuit.
Rekdal 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: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. 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, was published spring 2019. Appropriate: A Provocation is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021. She 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 work has 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.
She 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 May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Founded at Mercer University in 1985, the Georgia Poetry Circuit is a consortium of 10 Georgia colleges and universities working together to bring poets of national and international repute to all member campuses each year. This provides important access to the literary arts for Georgia residents across the state.
At each school, each circuit poet gives a free and open reading of his/her work. Visiting poets also meet with creative writing students at each campus for workshops, talks or extended question-and-answer sessions. In addition to the opportunity to hear work from diverse writers, circuit events provide Georgia students with an immensely valuable educational opportunity for interaction with excellent contemporary poets in the United States.
Rekdal’s poetry reading will be held at 12:30 p.m. in Flowers Executive Classroom inside Smith-Bonvillian Hall on TU’s Forbes Campus and online at www.facebook.com/actu31792/live. No Facebook account is required.
ACTU is supported in part by Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia Council for the Arts also receives support from its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information about this and other ACTU events, visit www.facebookcom/actu31792 or www.thomasu.edu/actu, call 229-227- 6964 or email actu@thomasu.edu.
