Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid genre, photo-text memoir Intimate; the book-length essay The Broken Country; and seven books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Animal Eye, Imaginary Vessels, Nightingale, and West: A Translation. 

Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship,the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award, the Washington State Book Award, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, and 2019), and various state arts council awards.   Animal Eye was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and was the winner of the 2013 UNT Rilke Prize. Imaginary Vessels was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among many others.   Her newest book of nonfiction on cultural approriation, Appropriate: A Provocation, was published from W.W. Norton in 2021, and she has a forthcoming book, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens: On Reading Poetry, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2025. She was the Best American Poetry Series guest editor for 2020. From 2017-2023, Paisley was Utah's Poet Laureate.

Paisley is the creator and managing editor for the web archive of Utah writers, Mapping Literary Utah (www.mappingliteraryutah.org), and also Mapping Salt Lake City, a community-written web atlas that maps the various communities and neighborhoods of Salt Lake City through critical and creative literature, interactive maps, and multi-media projects (www.mappingslc.org). Her book West: A Translation is accompanied by an interactive digital poem (www.westtrain.org). 

Paisley currently directs the American West Center at the University of Utah.