Trethewey << TREHTH eh way >> , Natasha (1966-…), is an acclaimed American poet. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection Native Guard (2006). From 2012 to 2014, Trethewey served as poet laureate of the United States.
Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and spent much of her youth in Atlanta. She is the daughter of a white Canadian father and a Black American mother. Much of Trethewey’s poetry reflects her historical and personal racial roots. Her parents divorced when she was 6 years old, and her mother later remarried but again divorced. When Trethewey was 19, the second ex-husband murdered her mother. In Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020), Trethewey explores the wrenching impact of the event and how it led her to writing poetry as a means of dealing with her grief.
Trethewey writes in a variety of styles, including traditional ballads, sonnets, and free verse. Free verse is a poetic style that does not include such traditional elements of poetry as regular meter or rhyme. Trethewey’s first collection of poetry was Domestic Work (2000). The book describes the histories of working-class Black men and women in the South. Her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), is a kind of short novel in verse. It is written in the form of letters and diary entries. The book was inspired by a collection of photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans taken during the early 1900’s. Ophelia, the title character in the collection, is a mixed-race prostitute.
Native Guard centers on the Louisiana Native Guards, an African American regiment that served with the Union forces during the American Civil War (1861-1865). The book also pays tribute to Trethewey’s murdered mother. Thrall (2012) centers on the poet’s interpretation of Mexican and Spanish paintings, primarily in terms of race. Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018) weaves stories of working class African Americans with the poet’s own family history.
Trethewey also wrote Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), a collection of essays, letters, and poems. The book describes the devastation in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina spread throughout Gulfport and the surrounding coast, as well as its impact on her family.
Trethewey earned a B.A. degree from the University of Georgia in 1989 and an M.A. degree from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1991. She also received an M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1995. Trethewey became an English professor at Auburn University in 1997. In 2001, she moved to Emory University, where she was a professor of English and creative writing and held the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. Trethewey became a professor of English and creative writing at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 2017.
