Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically

A poet of Chinese American heritage born in Seattle, Washington, Paisley Rekdal earned a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her collection Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) won the 2013 Rilke Prize, and West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She also wrote Nightingale (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Rekdal served as Poet Laureate of Utah from 2017 to 2022 and received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in 2019. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, and she is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.