Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Tretheway in 2013. Photo by Slowking. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Natasha Trethewey
Born	April 26, 1966 (1966-04-26) Gulfport, Mississippi
Occupation	poet, professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	AB, University of Georgia, MA, Hollins University, MFA, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Genres	Poetry
Notable award(s)	Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 2007 Poet Laureate of Mississippi, 2012 United States Poet Laureate, 2012-2014
Spouse(s)	Brett Gadsden
Influences Robert Penn Warren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney

Natasha D. Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and academic, appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012.

Life

Family

Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her parents, Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann (Turnbough), 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 father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University.

Tretheway's mother 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 2nd husband (whom she had recently divorced) when Tretheway 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".

Education and career

Trethewey earned an A.B. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst in 1995.

She holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University, and is the Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence for 2012 at Hollins University.

U.S. Poet Laureate

Tretheway at 2011 book signing, University of Michigan. Photo by Jalissa Gray. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

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." Newpapers noted that unlike most poet laureates, Trethewey is in the middle of her career. She was also the 1st laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C. when she does so in January 2013.

Writing

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 poem 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 — Tretheway 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.

Recognition

She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, In May 2010, Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University's 168th Commencement Exercises, and was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. In December 2007, she had received the same degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi. Subsequently she and served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

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 1st annual Cave Canem Foundation Poetry Prize for Domestic Work, selected by Rita Dove
• 1999 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Publications

Poetry

• Domestic Work. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000. ISBN 978-1-55597309-4
• Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002. ISBN 978-1-55597359-9
• Native Guard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. ISBN 978-0-61887265-7
• Thrall: Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Non-fiction

• Conversations with Natasha Tretheway (edited by Joan Wylie Hall). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.

Collected editions

• Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (poetry, essays, and letters). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-82033381-6

Edited

• Best New Poets 2007 (edited by Natasha Trethewey and Jeb Livengood). Charlottesville, VA: Samovar Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-976-62962-7

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Natasha Trethewey, U S poet laureate, reads "Elegy" at Emory University

Audio / video

• An Evening with Natasha Trethewey (MP3). Philadelphia: Free Library of Philadelphia, 2012.

See also

• African American poets
• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Pilgrimage," Forbes
• "Domestic Work, 1937" at Poetry 180
• Natasha Trethewey profile & 7 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• Natasha Trethewey b. 1966 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Natasha Tretheway at PoemHunter (3 poems).

Audio / video

• Trethewey reading from "The Native Guard" in February 2006: Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Volume 5, No. 1 (Spring 2006)
• Natasha Tretheway at YouTube
• Jake Adam York interviews Natasha Tretheway on Southern Spaces

Books

• Natasha D. Trethewey at Amazon.com

About

• Faculty bio at Emory
• More about Natasha Tretheway at the Library of Congress