Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid-genre photo-text memoir Intimate; the book-length essay The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam; and a book on cultural appropriation in literature titled Appropriate: A Provocation, published by W.W. Norton in February 2021.  She is also the author of six books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Animal Eye, Imaginary Vessels and Nightingale. A two-time finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize, her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship and inclusion in five editions of the Best American Poetry series. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among others. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, she guest edited The Best American Poetry 2020 anthology and is currently Utah’s poet laureate. 

The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium and will also be available via livestream. Registration for the livestream is required and can be accessed via Zoom.

(NOTE: In accordance with Penn State policy, all individuals are required to wear face masks inside all campus buildings, regardless of their vaccination status.)