Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet and former Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, and six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2024 The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council. She has been recognized for her poems and essays in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series, and on National Public Radio, among others. She was a recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.