Natasha Trethewey

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Natasha Trethewey Biography

American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012. She received the Pulitzer Prize for a 2006 poetry collection entitled Native Guard; her other works include Bellocq’s Ophelia and Thrall.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia and went on to obtain a master’s degree in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University (in Virginia).

She served as director of the Emory University Creative Writing Program.

Her father, Eric Trethewey, also had a career as a poet. Her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was murdered in 1985.

She succeeded Philip Levine as United States Poet Laureate.

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”.

Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2013. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

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. 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.

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”. 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. The book explores the work and lives of black men and women in the South.

She is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University and Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she has taught since 2001.

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.

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. 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.”

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.

Trethewey was appointed for a second term as US Poet Laureate in 2013, 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”. On May 14, 2014, Trethewey delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.

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, 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.

Trethewey was elected in 2019 both to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Academy of American Poets Chancellor David St. John said Trethewey “is one of our formal masters, a poet of exquisite delicacy and poise who is always unveiling the racial and historical inequities of our country and the ongoing personal expense of these injustices. Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal experience felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound.”

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