Mar 8, 2021, 3:00 pm

Please come join us for an intimate conversation with three writers as they consider when and how to highlight intersections of identity in their literary art. In this panel discussion, Necessary Risks: A Conversation about Race and Representation in Art, Utah poet laureate, Paisley Rekdal, will reflect on her latest book, Appropriate: A Provocation, a work that considers the thorny issues around cultural appropriation. She will be joined by poet and memoirist Natasha Saje whose book, Terroir, focuses on the immigrant experience in relation to ideas of place, and Jacqueline Balderrama, poet and author of Now In Color, a multigenerational exploration of the Mexican-American experience. The conversation promises to be urgent, complex, and grounded in the way the literary arts create unique spaces for such investigations.

Moderated by Niyonta Chowdhury

Please join us on Zoom, Monday, March 8 at 3PM.

Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_X4_0jtwKQQCtGMw6Dnjkwg

Natasha Saje is the author of three books of poems including Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014). A chapbook is forthcoming this summer from Diode Editions. Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, a postmodern poetry handbook, was published in 2014 by the U of Michigan Press. Trinity University press published Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays, in 2020. Saje teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. www.natashasaje.com

Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of Now in Color (Perugia Press, 2020) and the chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She serves as a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine and has been involved in the Letras Latinas literary initiative, the ASU Prison Education Program, and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Black Bird, New Ohio Review, among others. Currently, she’s pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid's The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, is available now from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021. She was the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020.

This event is sponsored by the Utah Humanities Council, the Utah State University English Department, and the Center for Intersectional Gender Studies & Research at Utah State University.

Zoom Conference Call

3200 Old Main Hl
Logan , UT 84322-3200
Map [+]

Event Contact:

Willy Palomo
palomo@utahhumanities.org