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Natasha Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, will give a reading 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104.
U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, photo by Joel Smith
The talk is the 2014 John L Hatfield ’67 Lecture hosted by the Friends of Skillman Library. It is free and open to the public, with a reception and book signing following in the lobby. Prior to the talk, Trethewey will meet with students from the Advanced Creative Writing class taught by Lee Upton, professor of English and writer-in-residence.
Trethewey is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000); Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); Native Guard (2006), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize; and most recently, Thrall (2012). Her book of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was published in 2010. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.
In his citation appointing Trethewey Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote, “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.”
Now in her second term as U.S. Poet Laureate, Trethewey’s signature project is a feature on the PBS NewsHour series “Where Poetry Lives.” In this series, she travels with senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown to various cities across the U.S., exploring connections between societal issues and poetry, literature, and her own personal experiences. She also serves as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.