She hails from Mississippi where her work is well known.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Natasha Trethewey recalls her young years in Mississippi, during a break in her speaking schedule at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss.
Natasha Trethewey (click here) was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.
Natasha Trethewey (click here) was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.
Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Doveas the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
Since then, she has published two more collections of poetry, including Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). Her latest collection of poems, Thrall is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September of 2012....
Published
06/11/2012 12:00 AM
Updated
06/08/2012 05:32 PM
While
Trethewey was a college freshman, her mother was killed by a
stepfather Tretheway had long feared.
"I
started writing poems as a response to that great loss, much the way
that people responded, for example, after 9/11," she told The
Associated Press. "People who never had written poems or turned
much to poetry turned to it at that moment because it seems like the
only thing that can speak the unspeakable."
Trethewey,
46, an English and creative writing professor at Emory University in
Atlanta, recently was named the 19th U.S. poet laureate.
The
Pulitzer Prize winner is the nation's first poet laureate to hail
from the South since the initial one - Robert Penn Warren - was named
by the Library of Congress in 1986. She is also Mississippi's top
poet and will be the first person to serve simultaneously as a state
and U.S. Laureate....
