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A chat with Paisley Rekdal, former Poet Laureate of Utah, who will soon read from her work at TU

Published March 30, 2023 at 12:02 PM CDT

Aired on Thursday, March 30th.

Rekdal's multimedia piece, "West: A Translation" -- which she'll read from here on campus -- employs translations, archival research, essays, poems, videos, and images in order to document the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where many Chinese migrants were detained after the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

Our guest is Paisley Rekdal, who from 2017 to 2022 served as Utah's Poet Laureate and is currently a professor of literature at the University of Utah. She's the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, including "Nightingale: Poems" (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and "Appropriate: A Provocation" (Norton, 2021). Rekdal will deliver a free-to-the-public poetry reading on the TU campus tonight (Thursday the 30th) at 7pm. The event happens in Tyrrell Hall; more info can be found here. Rekdal's reading is the third in a three-part "Documentary Poetry Series," which spotlights work by poets using fieldwork, archives, and other such tangible research to address social and political concerns.

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StudioTulsa Poetry TU English TU Creative Writing Literacy and Reading Literary Criticism Chinese History American History Migration The Immigrant Experience (in America)California 19th-Century America Historical Research Academic Life and Culture Nonfiction Cultural and Ethnic Diversity Diversity Issues Writers on Writing

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