Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey reading at the Library of Congress in 2013
Born	(1966-04-26) April 26, 1966 Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	AB, University of Georgia, MA, Hollins University, MFA, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Genre	Poetry
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2007 Poet Laureate of Mississippi 2012 United States Poet Laureate 2012 Lamont Poet at Phillips Exeter Academy 2012
Spouse	Brett Gadsden

Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.

Family

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as “Canadian”.

Trethewey's mother, a social worker, was part of the inspiration for Native Guard, which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was young and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old. Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened".

Natasha Trethewey's father was also a poet; he was a professor of English at Hollins University.

Natasha Trethewey during book signing at the University of Michigan, 2011

Education

Trethewey earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.

Poetry

Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America". Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), for example, is a collection of poetry in the form of an epistolary novella; it tells the fictional story of a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.

The American Civil War makes frequent appearances in her work. Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood. For example, Native Guard tells the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black regiment in the Union Army, composed mainly of former slaves who enlisted, that guarded the Confederate prisoners of war.

United States Poet Laureate

On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was "immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it." Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. On May 14, 2014, Tretheway delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.

Bibliography

Poetry

• (Poetry, essays, and letters)

Awards

• 2012 United States Poet Laureate
• 2012 Poet Laureate of Mississippi
• 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• 2004 Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for residency at the Bellagio Study Center
• 2003 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• 2001, 2003, 2007 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prizes
• 2001, 2007 Lillian Smith Book Award
• 2000 Bunting Fellowship for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
• 1999 First Annual Cave Canem Foundation Poetry Prize for Domestic Work, selected by Rita Dove
• 1999 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

External links

• Natasha Trethewey: Online Resources at the Library of Congress
• U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway Speaks at AUS
• Faculty bio at Emory
• Natasha Trethewey on Southern Spaces
• Trethewey reading from The Native Guard February 2006, in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Volume 5, No. 1 (Spring 2006)
• Trethewey interview with Daniel Cross Turner for Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature (Fall 2011)
• Natasha D. Trethewey at Library of Congress Authorities, with 5 catalog records