CWU’s Lion Rock Visiting Writer Series Hosts Author Paisley Rekdal

Central Washington University's popular Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series will host award-winning memoirist, poet, and scholar Paisley Rekdal for a virtual reading at 6 p.m. on May 25 and craft talk at 12 noon on May 26.

Rekdal is the author of a collection of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, which explores race and family lineage, as well as five acclaimed books of poetry, and a hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate: An American Family Photo Album, engaging, among other things, with the photography of Edward Curtis.

"Paisley Rekdal could be taught in any number of our courses because of the breadth of her body of work," noted CWU English Professor Maya Zeller, who coordinates the Lion Rock series. "Her books engage readers on topics including race, gender, feminism, form, history, critical theory, publishing, research, myth, and culture."

Rekdal's most recent book, Appropriate: A Provocation (Norton, February 2021), makes creative use of epistolary to examine and discuss appropriation in literary publishing, and her newest work of creative nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of her poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses, was published in 2019.

Rekdal has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She also served as guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.

She is a distinguished professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of the community web projects, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. In 2017, she was named Utah's Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Prior to Rekdal's appearance, CWU student Kathleen Singleton provide an introduction and short reading.

• Register in advance for her 5/25, 6pm reading here.

• Register in advance for her 5/26, 12noon craft talk here.

The Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series schedules readings every quarter and features nationally known writers reading their own work. It is sponsored by the English Department, CWU College of Arts and Humanities, Brooks Library, Wildcat Shop, Karen Gookin, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, Associated Students of CWU Services and Activities Committee, Office of the President, and Office of the Vice President for Inclusivity and Diversity.

Media contact: Richard Moreno, Department of Public Affairs, 509-963-2714, Richard.Moreno@cwu.edu.