Author and poet Paisley Rekdal will lead a virtual workshop for students sponsored by the Department of English.
Space is limited to 20 participants; please RSVP to Professor Keija Parssinen.
How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In this student workshop, creative writing professor and poet Paisley Rekdal will examine the debate between appropriation and imagination by offering students a study of techniques, both successful and unsuccessful, that writers from Ernest Hemingway to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins have employed to create characters outside their own identities. This workshop will also answer student questions about what constitutes the difference between respectful cultural approximation and harmful cultural appropriation in their own writing practice.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, "The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee;" a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled "Intimate;" and six books of poetry: "A Crash of Rhinos," "Six Girls Without Pant," "The Invention of the Kaleidoscope," "Animal Eye" (winner of the UNT Rilke Prize), and "Imaginary Vessels" (a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize), and "Nightingale." Her book "The Broken Country" won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize, and her newest work of nonfiction, "Appropriate: A Provocation," was published by W.W. Norton in 2021. Her work has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship Trust and various state arts councils. Her poetry has been included in multiple editions of "The Best American Poetry" series, and she was guest editor for "Best American Poetry 2020." She is Utah's poet laureate.
This event is sponsored by the English Department, Richard L. Thomas Chair, Center for Innovative Pedagogy, and Anti-Racism Fund.