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'Appropriate: A Provocation', With Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal

Host Lauren Korn and poet-essayist Paisley Rekdal, author of Appropriate: A Provocation, dive into the nuances of cultural appropriation in literature. What is the difference between depicting a character unlike one’s self and appropriating their culture and identity? What is the difference between one’s politics and one’s ethics? They explore these topics and more, this week on The Write Question.

About Paisley: Paisley Rekdal is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and American Poetry Review, as well as on NPR. She teaches at the University of Utah and is the state’s poet laureate. She lives in Salt Lake City.

Paisley recommends

• The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind edited by Claudian Rankine and Beth Loffreda (Fence Books)

Why Was It So Easy for Jessica Krug to Fool Everyone? by Jason England

• How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi (Penguin Random House; One World)

• Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses (Catapult)

Black Mirror, Season 4, Episode 6: “Black Museum” directed by Colm McCarthy and written by Charlie Brooker

Lauren recommends

• A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib (Penguin Random House)

• Citizen: An American Lyric and Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)

• White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row (Graywolf Press)

Lauren R. Korn holds an M.A. in poetry from the University of New Brunswick, where she was the recipient of the Tom Riesterer Memorial Prize and the Angela Ludan Levine Memorial Book Prize. A former bookseller and the former Director of the Montana Book Festival, she is now an Arts and Culture Producer at Montana Public Radio and the host of it’s literature-based radio program and podcast, ‘The Write Question.’
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