Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Her parents had traveled to Ohio to marry because their marriage was illegal in Mississippi at the time of Trethewey's 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".[7][8]

Trethewey's mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was a social worker and part of the inspiration for Native Guard (2006), which is dedicated to her memory. Trethewey's parents divorced when she was six and Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband, whom she had recently divorced, when Trethewey was 19 years old.[9] 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."[7]

Trethewey's father, Canadian emigrant Eric Trethewey, was also a poet and a professor of English at Hollins University.[10][11][12]

Trethewey is married to historian Brett Gadsden.[13]

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

Trethewey earned her B.A. degree 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.[14] In May 2010 Trethewey delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate.[10] She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.[15]

Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms such as the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines "memory and the racial legacy of America".[7] Trethewey's first published collection, Domestic Work (2000), was the inaugural recipient of the Cave Canem prize for a first book by an African American poet.[16] The book explores the work and lives of black men and women in the South.

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.[7] For example, her 2006 book 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.

On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate.[17] 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."[18] Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career.[7] She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013.[19]

Trethewey was appointed for a second term as US Poet Laureate in 2013,[20] and as several previous multiyear laureates had done, Trethewey took on a project, which took the form of a regular section on PBS News Hour called "Where Poetry Lives".[21] On May 14, 2014, Trethewey delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.[22]

• 2018 Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature[24]
• 2017 22nd Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities[25]
• 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship[26]
• 2015 PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award
• 2012 United States Poet Laureate[1]
• 2012 Poet Laureate of Mississippi[3]
• 2012 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement[27][28]
• 2011 Georgia Writers Hall of Fame Inductee[29]
• 2009 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at Yale's Beinecke Library.[30]
• 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year by the Georgia Commission on Women[31]
• 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry[32]
• 2004 Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for residency at the Bellagio Study Center[33]
• 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[34]
• 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[35]
• 1999 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Natasha Trethewey.

• 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)
• Joe Heim (April 23, 2014). "Just Asking: Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey". The Washington Post.
• Natasha D. Trethewey at Library of Congress Authorities, with 5 catalog records
• Natasha Trethewey Poems and Profile at Poets.org
• "Natasha Trethewey" at Poetry Foundation.
• Biography and Poems of Natasha Trethewey at Americanpoems.com
• Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Natasha Trethewey papers, 1942-2013