Trethewey is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She previously served as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she taught from 2001 to 2017.[4]
Trethewey was elected in 2019 both to the American Academy of Arts and Letters[5] 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.”[6] Trethewey was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.[7]
Early life
Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Her parents 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".[8][9][10]
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.[11] 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."[8]
Trethewey's father, Canadian emigrant Eric Trethewey, was also a poet and a professor of English at Hollins University.[12][13][14]
Trethewey is married to historian Brett Gadsden.[15]
Natasha Trethewey during book signing at the University of Michigan, 2011
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".[8] 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.[18] 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 epistolarynovella; it tells the fictional story of a mixed-race prostitute who was photographed by E. J. Bellocq in early 20th-century New Orleans.
Her work, Beyond Katrina, published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, is an account of the devastating events that happened after the hurricane hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This novel tells of how her friends, family, and neighbors were affected by the damage of Hurricane Katrina. Her writing includes themes of race conflicts, memories of her family background, and the economic effects of what the hurricane caused. Although it is a novel, she includes her poetry to capture the events that were caused beyond the hurricane itself. She also tackles what it's like being an African American in a troubled state of circumstance with the place where one grew up and loves. Trethewey found inspiration for her novel in Robert Penn Warren's book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Trethewey includes pictures throughout her book alongside her writing. These serve as a visual device, to aid in the readers understanding of the novel.
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.[8] 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 Confederateprisoners of war.
United States Poet Laureate
On June 7, 2012, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate.[19] 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."[20] Newspapers noted that unlike most poets laureate, Trethewey is in the middle of her career.[8] She was also the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013.[21]
Trethewey was appointed for a second term as US Poet Laureate in 2013,[6] 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".[22] On May 14, 2014, Trethewey delivered her final lecture to conclude her second term as US Poet Laureate.[23]
Positions
Trethewey has held appointments at Duke University, as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies, and at Emory University, where she was Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing; the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and Yale University.[24]
^Trethewey, Eric In the Traces: poems. Tempe, Ariz.: Inland Boat/Porch Publications 1980 // Songs and Lamentations: poems. Cincinnati, OH: Word Press, c2004
