paisley rekdal

Audio

LISTEN to Paisley's piece about her outdoor adventure.

Text

READ an excerpt from Paisley's memoir, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee.

READ Paisley's poem "Making Out in Korean."

COMING SOON, Paisley's Web site at www.paisleyrekdal.com.

Paisley Rekdal is the only child of a Chinese-American mother and a father of Norwegian descent. She was born and raised in Seattle, Washington where she first cultivated her reputation as a bad-ass city girl. Her parents were hoping she'd grow up to be respectable but instead she became a writer.

She's the author of a memoir, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, Observations on Not fitting In; a collection of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, and a forthcoming collection of poetry entitled, Six Girls Without Pants. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Nerve, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, and The Indiana Review, among others. She is the recipient of The Village Voice's Writers on the Verge Award (2000), University of Georgia Press' Contemporary Poetry Series Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She has an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, and an MFA from the University of Michigan.

In case you're not impressed (and you should be) she also has a black belt in Tae Kwan Do. Recently, Paisley tossed her city girl sensibility to the wind and went west, settling in Laramie, Wyoming where she teaches poetry at the university, writes poetry and prose and occasionally ventures into the wild.

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