Paisley Rekdal (she/her)

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, including, "West: A Translation," which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Utah Book Award in Poetry, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her newest book of poems is "Heritance." A former Guggenheim Fellow and Utah Poet Laureate, she directs the American West Center at the University of Utah.

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Awards: Guggenheim Fellow, Pushcart Prize, Kingsley Tufts Prize

Communities: Asian American, Mixed Race

Books:

Heritance

Poetry
Copper Canyon Press
January 2026
ISBN 9781556597367
Paperback, 0 pages

Writing from a mixed heritage, Paisley Rekdal voices both the sins of our fathers and the suffering of our mothers. In Paisley Rekdal's latest collection, Heritance, the body and its meanings are ever shifting—it is, at once, a legacy, an obligation, and a means of generating more bodies. Summoning memories of parents, former partners, and children both real and hypothetical, Heritance examines the personal and familial shames we inherit. Can something so ephemeral as memory be owned? In what ways do we become complicit in the political values of our families, our nations, and our chosen—or assumed—communities? Here, Rekdal grapples with the inevitable loss of loved ones and relationships, but also of climate change and social evolution—asking what values do we choose to preserve, and which ones do we reinvent for a new era? And in what ways can art recompense for our personal and cultural wounds? Meditating on race, violence, and lineage, Rekdal challenges the reader to contextualize their perspective within the corporeal, and to question what it means to love outside of “the lens of someone else's imagining." More/less

West

A Translation
Poetry
Copper Canyon Press
January 2023
ISBN 9781556596568
Paperback, 0 pages

National Book Award, 2023 Longlist * "Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning. "--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW* "A must-have for libraries." --Booklist, STARRED REVIEW"A remarkable collection offering history not typically told in textbooks."--Library JournalPunctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West: A Translation explores what unites and divides America, drawing a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act.In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation--an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad's completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained during the Chinese Exclusion Act, is a poem elegizing a detainee who committed suicide. As West translates this anonymous Chinese elegy character by character, what's left is a haunting narrative distilled through the history and lens of transcontinental railroad workers, and a sweeping exploration of the railroad's cultural impact on America. Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history creep forward, even as the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral back.West is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) which features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad's history through an interactive, non-linear structure. Pairing this urgent book and innovative website, Rekdal masterfully challenges how histories themselves get written and disseminated. The result is a tour de force of resistance and resilience. More/less