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Documentary Poetry: An Evening with Paisley Rekdal
Come hear Paisley Rekdal share her recent multi-media piece, West: A Translation, which was commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. Incorporating translations, archival research, essays, poems, videos and images, the work responds to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where Chinese migrants were detained, sometimes for up to 22 months. West: A Translation is a sweeping meditation on the railroad’s cultural impact on America, its environmental consequences, the experience of the immigrants and minorities who built the rails, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and more.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of more than ten books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Nightingale: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) and Appropriate: A Provocation (W.W. Norton, 2021). A two-time finalist of the Kingsley Tufts Prize, Rekdal has garnered fellowships from the NEA, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She guest edited Best American Poetry 2020, and her own work is forthcoming from or has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The New York Times Magazine. From 2017 to 2022, she served as Utah's Poet Laureate. She is a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of Utah.
The Documentary Poetry Series is sponsored by The University of Tulsa’s Department of English and Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
