Contact: City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com Paisley Rekdal introduces Lisa Bickmore at City Art Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch 210 East 400 South Salt Lake City UT 84111 Wednesday November 16th, 6:30 to 8:00 P.M.               Former Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal will introduce the new Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, November 16the at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 6:30 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series.    Lisa Bickmore is the current Poet Laureate of Utah. Born in Dover, Delaware, Bickmore grew up living all over the United States and in Japan. She is the author of three books of poems: Haste (Signature Books, 1994), flicker, which won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press, and Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, June 2017).  Her poetry, scholarship, and video work have been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Tar River Poetry; Sugar House Review; SouthWord; Caketrain; Hunger Mountain Review; Terrain.org; Bite-Size Poems project (Utah Division of Arts & Museums); Quarterly West; The Moth; MappingSLC.org; Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets; and elsewhere. In 2015, her poem “Eidolon” was awarded the Ballymaloe International Poetry Award. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Brigham Young University. She is recently retired from her position as a Professor of English at Salt Lake Community College, where she was the recipient of the SLCC Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 2006. She taught writing of all sorts, as well as publication studies, and is one of the founders of the SLCC Publication Center. ​In 2019, she founded the nonprofit Lightscatter Press, which published its first book in April of 2021.    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: 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; Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize, and Nightingale, which won the 2020 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. 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. She guest edited Best American Poetry 2020.  Two new books are forthcoming: a hybrid book-length poem entitled West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, May 2023) and Real Toads: Imaginary Gardens: How to Read and Teach a Poem (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). 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. Between 2017-2022, she served as Utah's Poet Laureate, receiving a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. | | | | | | | | | | | Mapping Salt Lake City | Stories, Memories & History - Home Mapping Salt Lake City is a community-created archive of Salt Lake City’s neighborhoods and people that document... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Mapping Salt Lake City | Stories, Memories & History - Home Mapping Salt Lake City is a community-created archive of Salt Lake City’s neighborhoods and people that document... | | |     Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.   Joel Long