Rea Visiting Lecturer Paisley Rekdal will give a poetry reading, free and open to the public, on Thursday at 8 p.m. in the University of Virginia Bookstore. The event is hosted by U.Va.’s Creative Writing Program.

Rekdal is the author of four poetry collections: “A Crash of Rhinos,” “Six Girls Without Pants,” “The Invention of the Kaleidoscope” and “Animal Eye.” She has also published a hybrid-genre memoir, “Intimate,” that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography, and a book of essays, “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In.”

For her work, Rekdal has received a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, a Pushcart Prize and a Village Voice “Writers on the Verge” Award.

She teaches at the University of Utah. The daughter of a Chinese-American mother and a Norwegian father, she grew up in Seattle, earned a B.A. from the University of Washington, a master’s degree from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. 

Publisher’s Weekly wrote about “Animal Eye” that the “collection is relentlessly heartbreaking and intense, but also full of the pleasures of closely observed detail and imagination given free rein.”

Rekdal’s visit as a Rea Lecturer will include an opportunity for creative writing students in the M.F.A. program in the Department of English to hear her talk about the craft of writing poetry.

The Rea Visiting Writers Series is funded through the Dungannon Foundation in memory of Michael Rea, an ardent supporter of the arts and U.Va.

Terrence Hayes will come to U.Va. the week of Feb. 17 as the Rea Visiting Writer in Poetry. He will give a reading Feb. 20 at 8 p.m. in the U.Va. Bookstore.