SEPTEMBER 26, 2025 | NEWS | By Sydney McGarr
Paisley Rekdal, University of Utah professor and distinguished writer and poet, was set to speak at the Air Force Academy on Sept. 10. Instead, she ended up in front of a sizable crowd at Colorado College’s Packard Hall.
“I didn’t think I was going to be here,” she said. “It’s been a long, strange couple of weeks.”
Rekdal’s original talk was canceled by the U.S. Air Force Academy after the academy discovered that she had publicly made comments criticizing President Trump on X, formerly Twitter.
Upon learning about the cancellation, a team of Colorado College staff and faculty decided to invite Rekdal to speak on the same day as her originally planned speech. The event was sponsored by the Maclean Visiting Writers Series, the dean of faculty’s office, the NEH Professorship Grant, Asian Studies, Southwest Studies, and the departments of English, History and Political Science.
A few hours before the speech, conservative media personality Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University. Colorado College increased safety precautions for the event following the news, implementing a no-bag policy with Campus Safety in attendance.
Rekdal told the Colorado Springs Gazette that the news had shaken her.
“I appreciate everyone coming out tonight,” she said, addressing the crowd. “Especially since I’m sure with the news a lot of you were thinking maybe being in an area like this might not be the best idea, but we persist in the freedom of speech.”
Further into the opening remarks of her reading, she acknowledged the original cancellation.
“I want to thank the Air Force Academy and not in a snarky way, in an honest way,” she said. “It was brave of them to think about inviting me.”
In an opinion piece titled “This is What Criticism of the President Cost Me,” published in The New York Times after the event, Rekdal said the cancellation of her talk sent a dangerous message about the protection of free speech in the United States.
“The Air Force Academy’s decision is bolstering a signal many Americans fear has already been sent: that the military is a wing of presidential and not constitutional defense, its loyalty particular to Mr. Trump, even to the point of treating Americans themselves as the enemy,” she wrote.
The idea of military power is not new to Rekdal, who has been writing about war trauma since the beginning of her professional career. Much of her work considers how war is memorialized, inherited, and represented as a concept that continuously shifts our cultures and societal values.
Her talk expertly wove together readings of her poetry with videos that Rekdal herself had created with background information about the subjects of her works.
Rekdal read mostly from her 2018 work, “West: A Translation,” which was written as a response to a request to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The collection specifically commemorates the experience of Chinese migrant workers and the Chinese Exclusion Act.
She also performed some pieces from her earlier work, “The Broken Country.”