Chatting with Paisley Rekdal

We’re chatting with Paisley Rekdal!! We’re featuring Rekdal's performance of West: A Translation at City of Asylum back in September 2019, as well as a recent interview with Rekdal in support of her newest book Appropriate: A Provocation. We're also talking The Ferrante Project, when it's okay to wear a sombrero, and how not to be a jerk about appropriation.

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as five books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including but not limited to a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship among others… She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio, to name a few.

We’ll also get into country music, the epistolary form, using pseudonyms to write soft-core pornography, as well as what we’re reading, and some thoughts for the road!