City of Asylum will host "Paisley Rekdal & Matthew Salesses Live Reading and Conversation" on February 22.
Appropriate, A Provocation — Utah’s poet laureate Paisley Rekdal’s newest book is a timely, nuanced work dissecting the thorny debate around cultural appropriation and the literary imagination. Paisley Rekdal will be joined in conversation by bestselling author Matthew Salesses for a live discussion and audience Q&A.The online event runs from 7:00 to 8:15 pm. It is free and open to the public, though registration is required.
How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved—and perhaps calcified—in our political climate. What follows is a penetrating exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. Lucid, reflective, and astute, Appropriate presents a generous new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.