Please join us on Wednesday, February 16th at 7 pm for the Laurie Okuma Memorial Reading, featuring Award-winning Author and Utah’s Poet Laureate, Paisley Rekdal. 

Each semester, thanks to an endowment created by her family and friends, the Laurie Okuma Memorial Reading honors the memory of SDSU alumna, Laurie Matsueda Okuma. The spring 2022 Okuma author, Paisley Rekdal, will share excerpts from her latest publications, including the multimedia project, West: A Translation (https://westtrain.org), and the award-winning collection of poetry, Nightingale, and answer questions from attendees. This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative and the College of Arts and Letters.

Register in advance for this event

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and six books of poetry, most recently Nightingale, which won the Washington State Book Award. Her newest works of nonfiction are a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam and Appropriate: A Provocation. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship, among many other honors. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of West: A Translation, as well as the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah's Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets' Poets Laureate Fellowship.