{"id":38172,"date":"2017-05-14T21:22:27","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T03:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38172"},"modified":"2018-09-22T21:23:08","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T03:23:08","slug":"15-bytes-book-award-winner-paisley-rekdal-is-utahs-new-poet-laureate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/15-bytes-book-award-winner-paisley-rekdal-is-utahs-new-poet-laureate\/","title":{"rendered":"15 Bytes Book Award Winner Paisley Rekdal is Utah\u2019s New Poet Laureate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paisley Rekdal, Photo by Austen Diamond<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Paisley Rekdal, winner of the inaugural 15 Bytes Book Award in poetry (2013), and professor of English at the University of Utah, has been named the new Utah Poet Laureate by the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. The Utah Poet Laureate, established in 1997, is a governor-appointed advocate for literature and the arts throughout the state who presents in communities, schools, libraries and public events.<\/p>\n

As the Utah Poet Laureate, Rekdal will create a website that maps the writers and poets of Utah, along with all of the various literary presses and journals in the state. She plans to conduct audio interviews with as many Utah poets, writers and publishers as possible and post them on the website. The project is a spin-off of\u00a0Mapping Salt Lake City<\/a>, a community-created archive of art and literature, which she created and manages.<\/p>\n

In an article posted by the University of Utah\u2019s UNews, she is quoted as saying: \u201cUltimately what I\u2019m hoping to do is make this site as inclusive as possible; I want to get poets and writers whose first language isn\u2019t English on this site, and I want to reach out to the indigenous communities and make sure their contemporary poets and writers, as well as their literary forebears are represented. I want to include conceptual poets as well as performance poets of all stripes, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rekdal plans to expand the reach and vision to represent as much of the state as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cUtah is neither monolithic or homogenous, regardless of how others outside our state perceive us. The state is composed of communities that are constantly changing, and for me the role of Poet Laureate is to respect and reflect those changes, however I can,\u201d added Rekdal.<\/p>\n

Rekdal is the author of a book of essays,\u00a0The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee<\/em>; the hybrid genre, photo-text memoir,\u00a0Intimate<\/em>\u00a0and five books of poetry,\u00a0A Crash of Rhinos<\/em>,\u00a0Six Girls Without Pants<\/em>,\u00a0The Invention of the Kaleidoscope<\/em>,\u00a0Animal Eye<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Imaginary Vessels<\/em>. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the University of Georgia Press\u2019 Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series (2012 and 2013) and various state arts council awards.<\/p>\n

Her poetry collection,\u00a0Animal Eye<\/em>\u00a0was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize and was the winner of the inaugural\u00a015 Bytes Book Award in 2013<\/a>\u00a0and the UNT Rilke Prize. 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 many others. Her newest book of nonfiction,\u00a0The Broken Country: On Trauma, A Crime, And The Continuing Legacy of Vietnam<\/em>, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize and will be published in September. It is available now for pre-order.<\/p>\n

Past Utah Poets Laureate:<\/p>\n

The first Poet Laureate of Utah was David Lee, St. George, appointed by Gov. Michael Leavitt
\n(January 1997 to January 2003); followed by Kenneth W. Brewer, Logan, appointed by Gov. Michael Leavitt
\n(January 2003 to March 2006); Katharine Coles, Salt Lake City, appointed by Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr.
\n(March 2006 to April 2012); and\u00a0Lance Larsen, Springville, appointed by Gov. Gary R. Herbert (April 2012 to April 2017).<\/p>\n

Larsen, a professor of English and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University said of his replacement:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m thrilled to have Paisley as our new Poet Laureate, one of the finest writers in the country. \u00a0Whether she\u2019s writing about\u00a0Mae West<\/a>\u00a0or bats, Bruce Lee or Vietnam, she brings to her observations a kindly inquisitiveness, a fierce generosity. She\u2019s equally at home in prose as poetry, equally at home in the academy talking theory or in the classroom translating theory into words on the page. \u00a0I think of Paisley not just as an advocate for the arts but as an advocate for life, in all its rich complexity. \u00a0Paisley, I wish you a fabulous four years, as you encourage us to tell our stories, whatever they might be.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Rekdal is currently on leave from the University, and out of town, she can be booked for future readings and workshops through the\u00a0Utah Division of Arts & Museums<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paisley Rekdal, Photo by Austen Diamond Paisley Rekdal, winner of the inaugural 15 Bytes Book Award in poetry (2013), and professor of English at the University of Utah, has been named the new Utah Poet Laureate by the Utah Division of Arts & Museums. The Utah Poet Laureate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 19:09:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38173,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38172\/revisions\/38173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}