With sly wit, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal has been commenting on social media throughout the year she was researching and writing “West,” a book-length poem about the Transcontinental Railroad. Jan. 20, 2018: “This week has been a series of some of the odder requests/assignments: writing for the Journal of Military History, poem solicitation for pamphlet on spiritual practices, a …
Max Chang: Reenvisioning history through the arts
Max Chang likes to joke — but he’s serious, too — about his claim as the state’s first Taiwanese-Utah native. He was born just a few months after his parents moved to Salt Lake City in 1969. In seventh-grade history class at Churchill Junior High, Chang learned about the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad at Utah’s Promontory Summit in 1869. …
Meet the Utah writer creating art from railroad history
In the voices of the ambitious “West,” Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal is writing a soundtrack to a distinctively American story. By Ellen Fagg Weist | Photography by Austen Diamond If you know where to look, the ghosts of Chinese workers appear everywhere on Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad byway. On a warm November morning, I’m standing with poet Paisley Rekdal in …