Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will speak on Tuesday, April 1, as the final guest of the Bainbridge State College Arts & Lecture series.
Born in Gulfport, Miss., and a resident of Decatur, Ga., Trethewey is the first Southerner to hold the title of U.S. Poet Laureate since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate who served from 1986-87, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993. In addition to being U.S. Poet Laureate, she is the State Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012-2016.
Trethewey was appointed the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States by Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. In his citation, 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.”
She is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000); Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Thrall, (2012). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
At Emory University, she is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing.
During her first term as Poet Laureate, Trethewey held office hours for the public at the Library of Congress. In her second term, Trethewey’s signature project is a feature on the PBS NewsHour: Where Poetry Lives. In this series, Trethewey travels with Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown to various cities across the United States in order to explore societal issues through a link to poetry and Trethewey’s personal experience.