516 WORDS: Reexamining the West with Paisley Rekdal
Thursday, December 5, 2024 6pm – 7:30pm
Delve into the history of the West through the lens of Chinese and other railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s impact on America with a dynamic, inter-media live reading from poet and scholar, Paisley Rekdal. Rekdal is the Director of the University of Utah’s American West Center, and was commissioned as Utah’s Poet Laureate to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental completion. The result was West: A Translation, a hybrid collection of poems, lyric essays, and accompanying website. Rekdal will read selections from West and present corresponding videos with interactive guidance from the audience.
Following this presentation will be a Q&A and moderated discussion with 516 ARTS curator Olivia Amaya Ortiz.
About the Speaker
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and most recently, West: A Translation, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the editor and creator of the digital archive projects West, Mapping Literary Utah, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and state arts council awards. Rekdal is a former Utah poet laureate and teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Center.
About the Moderator
In her role as Curator, Olivia Amaya Ortiz (she/her) maintains a passion for reconciling essentialist narratives of identity by advancing relationships to decolonial theory, collaborative programming, cultural revitalization and preservation, and to the poetics of representation. Prior to joining 516 ARTS, Olivia worked for the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) in Santa Fe, NM as well as the Tucson Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA Tucson) in Arizona. She facilitated museum education, community outreach initiatives and oversaw artist programs, including the Native Artist Fellowship Program at the IARC. Previous experience includes working in art journalism, gallery management, art education and she served as an Indigenous Educator Corps (IEC) member at the Native American Community Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico.