On June 7, 2012, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced the appointment of Natasha Trethewey as the Library’s Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2012-2013.  In 2012, she was also appointed the State Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

Natasha D. Trethewey (April 26, 1966), is an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007. Her works forge a rich intersection between the historical and autobiographical. In poems that are polished, controlled, and often based on traditional forms, Trethewey grapples with the dualities and oppositions that define her personal history: black and white, native and outsider, rural and urban, the memorialized and the forgotten. The daughter of a black mother and a white father, Trethewey grew up in a South still segregated by custom, if not by law, and her life astride the color line has inspired her recovery of lost histories, public and private.

Trethewey completed her B.A. degree at UGA in 1989, and in 1991 she earned an M.A. degree in English and creative writing at Hollins College (later Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied with her father, a professor there. By the time she earned her M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995, Trethewey was starting to publish, and her work has since appeared in the country's most prestigious literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry in both 2000 and 2003.

Trethewey took her first teaching job as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, in 1997. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Emory University, where she is a professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2005-6 she served as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Trethewey was the fourth African American poet, and UGA's first graduate outside of journalism, to win a Pulitzer Prize. In early 2008 she received the Mississippi Governor's Award for literary excellence. Trethewey lives in Decatur with her husband, Brett Gadsden, a historian and assistant professor of African American studies at Emory. (Source: New Georgia Encyclopedia)

Thrall: Poems
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 11, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0547571607
ISBN-13: 978-0547571607

Nominated for a 2013 NAACP Image Award for Poetry

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces--across time and space--that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall not only confirms that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Mano Prieta

The green drapery is like a sheet of water
behind us——a cascade in the backdrop
of the photograph, a rushing current

that would scatter us, carry us each
away. This is 1969 and I am three—
still light enough to be nearly the color

of my father. His armchair is a throne
and I am leaning into him, propped
against his knees—his hand draped

across my shoulder. On the chair’s arm
my mother looms above me,
perched at the edge as though

she would fall off. The camera records
her single gesture. Perhaps to still me,
she presses my arm with a forefinger,

makes visible a hypothesis of blood,
its empire of words: the imprint
on my body of her lovely dark hand.

Trethewey is daughter of interracial parents.  Her Black mother was killed, at age 40, by a stepfather Tretheway had long feared.  Her white father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet and college professor.

 

Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: University of Georgia Press (September 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0820333816
ISBN-13: 978-0820333816
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches

Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.

Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.

Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

Native Guard: Poems
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 64 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2nd edition (March 6, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0618604634
ISBN-13: 978-0618604630
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches

Winner Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Natasha Trethewey's muscular, luminous poems explore the complex memory of the American South—history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the Native Guards, one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In Trethewey's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. Native Guard is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as Trethewey skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices.

Interwoven are poems honoring Trethewey's mother and recalling her fraught childhood—her parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. Native Guard is a haunting, beguiling narrative, caught in the intersections of public and personal testament. As Rita Dove proclaimed, "Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft."

 

Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems
Click to order via Amazon

Paperback: 64 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (April 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555973590
ISBN-13: 978-1555973599
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches

Selected as a "2003 Notable Book" by the American Library Association

In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of her stunning second collection of poems. With elegant precision, Ophelia tells of her life on display: her white father whose approval she earns by standing very still; the brothel Madame who tells her to act like a statue while the gentlemen callers choose; and finally the camera, which not only captures her body, but also offers a glimpse into her soul.

 

Domestic Work
Click to order via Amazon

Paperback: 64 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (September 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555973094
ISBN-13: 978-1555973094
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches

Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet.

"Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength." - Rita Dove

In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

Excerpt.

DOMESTIC WORK, 1937

All week she's cleaned
someone else's house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she'd pull
the lid to --that look saying

Let's make a change, girl.

But Sunday mornings are hers --
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.

Cleanliness is next to godliness...

Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.

Nearer my God to Thee...

She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.

© Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

 

Related Links