Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey | |
|---|---|
Trethewey reading at the Library of Congress in 2013 | |
| Born | April 26, 1966 Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet, professor |
| Education | University of Georgia (BA) Hollins University (MA) University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MFA) |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (2020) Heinz Award (2017) Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2007) Cave Canem Poetry Prize (1999) |
| Spouse | Brett Gadsden |
| United States Poet Laureate | |
| In office 2012–2014 | |
| Preceded by | Philip Levine |
| Succeeded by | Charles Wright |
| Poet Laureate of Mississippi | |
| In office 2012–2016 | |
| Preceded by | Winifred Hamrick Farrar |
| Succeeded by | Beth Ann Fennelly |
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Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
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.
Trethewey was elected in 2019 both to the American Academy of Arts and Letters 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.” Trethewey was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.