Poet Laureate Celebration: Paisley Rekdal, Raquel Salas Rivera, Kim Shuck & Molly Fisk

The program features a reading and conversation recognizing the important civic role Poet Laureates play. To continue the community celebration, cookout food will be available for sale after the event!

The Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowships are financial awards given to honor poets of literary merit appointed to serve in civic positions and to enable them to undertake meaningful, impactful, and innovative projects that engage their fellow residents, including youth, with poetry, helping to address issues important to their communities.

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 five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pant; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, which was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her latest nonfiction work, The Broken Country, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize. Her newest collection of poetry is Nightingale. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, various state arts council awards, and has been included in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry series. She teaches at the University of Utah and is Utah’s Poet Laureate.

Raquel Salas Rivera es la Poeta Laureada de la ciudad de Filadelfia del 2018-19. Fue la recipiente inaugural del Premio Ambroggio y la Beca de Laureada, ambos de la Academia de Poetas Americanos. Es la recipiente de becas del Instituto Sundance, el Centro Kimmel para las Artes Performáticas, el Centro de Poesía de Arizona y CantoMundo.  Del 2016-2018 sirvió de editora para la revista literaria The Wanderer y Puerto Rico en mi corazón, una colección bilingüe de volantes de poetas puertorriqueños contemporáneos. Cuenta con la publicación de seis plaquetas y cinco poemarios. Su cuarto libro, lo terciario/the tertiary, fue finalista para el Premio Nacional del Libro del 2018 y ganó el Premio Literario Lambda a una obra de poesía transgénero del 2018. Su quinto poemario, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), fue publicado por por Birds, LLC en el 2019. Recibió su Doctorado en Literatura Comparada y Teoría Literaria de la Universidad de Pensilvania.  Raquel ama y vive por Puerto Rico, Filadelfia y un mundo libre de la supremacía blanca.

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Sundance Institute, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, the Arizona Poetry Center, and CantoMundo. From 2016-2018, they edited The Wanderer and Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, lo terciario/the tertiary, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.

Kim Shuck has been telling stories and making things with beads for so long that even her parents don’t know when it all started. She has an MFA in textiles, has provided cover art for three books of poetry in the last year and her beadwork is danced from North Carolina to Burbank during the pow wow season. Kim’s writing has earned a number of awards one of which, the then Diane Decorah award, led to her first solo book of poems Smuggling Cherokee.  Her most recent collection of poems is Murdered Missing. She is a recipient of a 2019 National Laureate Fellowship and is the seventh poet laureate of San Francisco.

Molly Fisk is currently an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, leading a statewide project in California to help children write about wildfires, flooding, and other climate-related disasters. She’s the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and four books of radio commentary, and has received grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She works as a life coach and teaches expressive writing to cancer patients in Nevada County, CA, where she was the inaugural Poet Laureate, 2017-2019.