Poetry is our Fall Residency Cross-Genre Area and Paisley Rekdal’s West: A Translation wins the Spalding Prize for 2026
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Kathleen Driskell, Chair
The Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University is pleased to announce that West: A Translation, a one-of-a-kind poetry collection by award-winning poet and writer Paisley Rekdal, wins the 2026 Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. West was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry and is the winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2024 Reading the West Award in Poetry. West: A Translation was also reviewed by poetry faculty Lynnell Edwards in the the spring 2024 issue of Good River Review.
In 2019, the Naslund-Mann School, home of the nationally distinguished low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program, established the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature to honor exceptional literary works that exemplify Spalding University’s mission. Each year, the authors of the winning title receive $7,500 and are named distinguished visiting writers for the fall residency. Recent past winners of the Spalding Prize include Kevin Willmott for the screenplay of BlacKkKlansman (co-written with Spike Lee); Honorée Fanonne Jeffers for the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois; Javier Zamora for the memoir Solito, and writing team Irene Sankoff and David Hein for the Broadway musical Come From Away. All awardees of the Spalding Prize can be found here.
West: A Translation is also our Fall 2006 Residency Book in Common
We are also delighted to name West: A Translation as our Residency Book in Common. Rekdal will visit our Fall 2026 Naslund-Mann residency to receive the Spalding Prize and to talk about her work with students, alumni, faculty, and the Louisville community on Tuesday, November 17, at 6 p.m. in The Brown Hotel. The next morning, Wednesday, November 18, Rekdal will attend a Q & A with Naslund-Mann students, alumni, and faculty.
West was written after Rekdal was commissioned by the Spike 150 Foundation to write a book commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. Rekdal’s West focuses on the immigration of 10,000 – 15,000 Chinese who immigrated to provide cheap labor to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads between 1864 and 1869, but also treats the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was made law thirteen years after the completion of the railroads and is the first law enacted to forbid immigration from one ethnic group or nationality. Many Chinese trying to immigrate to the U.S. found themselves detained, interrogated, and isolated for up to twenty-two months at the Angel Island Immigration Center. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained U.S. law until 1945.
West is a unique collection filled with documentary poems, persona poems, and other lyrics that speak directly to the Chinese immigration experience. At the collection’s end, Rekdal includes a series of short lyric essays that further elucidate the historical import of the Chinese who worked to complete the railroad, often under brutal conditions, but also those who found themselves trapped at Angel Island. Rekdal also developed a multi-media presentation that includes a historic photograph, audio, and a poem in Chinese to accompany her collection.
In addition to West: A Translation, Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven collections of poetry, including Animal Eye, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize; and Nightingale, winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book of poems is Heritance, and her most recent nonfiction includes 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. She has also published a pedagogy book, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading and Writing Poetry Forensically (W.W. Norton, 2024).
For her work, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.
She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches in the creative writing program and directs the American West Center. She is also the creator and editor of community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. She has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at both Stanford and the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program. Between 2017 and 2022, she served as Utah's Poet Laureate, receiving a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Learn more about Paisley Rekdal and her work at https://www.paisleyrekdal.com.
Required Virtual Pre-Lecture in Poetry, Sunday, October 4, 2-3 p.m. Eastern
Chair and poetry faculty member Kathleen Driskell presents the virtual pre-lecture “Four or More Ways of Knowing” on October 4, 2-3 pm Eastern. During this hourlong talk, Kathleen uses Gregory Orr’s seminal essay “The Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” as a framework to discuss the various ways in which we might better read (and write) poetry. The pre-lecture provides students with tools they need to be better prepared for reading and discussing the Fall 2026 book in common, West: A Translation, and to participate in the residency cross-genre exploration in poetry.
Shortly before the scheduled talk, a Zoom link will be emailed to students’ Spalding email accounts with a link to the lecture report required after attending the lecture. A link to Orr’s essay can be found on Canvas in the Residency Card. It’s not required for students to read this short essay by Orr, but Kathleen does find it a wonderful diagnostic approach for all kinds of literary writing and thinks students will benefit from it no matter their primary area of writing.
For those who have a schedule conflict, a recording will be provided for review and posted in Canvas in order to meet the residency course requirement for viewing and reporting on the pre-lecture.
Faculty & Guest Books or Scripts in Common and other highlights of the Fall 2026 residency will be announced soon.
Kathleen Driskell, Chair of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and Professor of Creative Writing, is an award-winning poet and essayist. In April 2025, she was named the Kentucky State Poet Laureate 2025-26 by Governor Andy Beshear. She was recently awarded a $50,000 Poet Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Rattle, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon University Press), as well as The Vine Temple (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and Next Door to the Dead (University Press of Kentucky), winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her collection Seed Across Snow (Red Hen Press) was named a Poetry Foundation Bestseller. She served as Chair of the Board of Directors of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, from 2019 to 2022.