Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966, Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S.) is an American poet and teacher who served as poet laureate consultant in poetry (2012–14). Her subjects were chiefly history (both her family’s and that of the American South), race, and memory.

Trethewey was born in the Deep South to an African American mother and a white father on the centennial of Confederate Memorial Day. Interracial marriage was still against the law in Mississippi when she was born. Her mother, a social worker, and her father, a Canadian poet and teacher, divorced when she was six. Her mother married again and in 1984 divorced her abusive second husband, who a year later murdered her. By Trethewey’s own account, her mother’s death occasioned her first attempt to write poetry. She was 19 years old, but, she said, she could not say what she wanted to express about that tragedy until many years later. She attended the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences (B.A., 1989), Hollins College (now Hollins University; M.A., 1991), and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (M.F.A., 1995). Thereafter she taught at several universities.

Her first volume of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), reflects on the lives of women who work for pay in other people’s households. It was chosen by Dove to be awarded the first Cave Canem Poetry Prize (established in 1999 and given to the best first book by an African American poet). Trethewey’s second volume, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), was inspired by photographer E.J. Bellocq’s evocative portraits of Storyville (New Orleans) prostitutes, notably that of a mixed-race woman named Ophelia. In Native Guard (2006; Pulitzer Prize), Trethewey honoured both her mother’s life and the largely unsung lives of the Union soldiers who made up the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the early African American units that fought in the American Civil War. In Thrall (2012) Trethewey ponders further the notions of race and racial mixing, mediated by such means as colonial Mexican casta paintings. Her fifth collection, Monument, was published in 2018. In addition to her well-received poetry, Tretheway wrote a work of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), in response to the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020), she discussed her mother’s life and death.

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