Natasha Trethewey

Posted by Sharyn Skeeter May 7, 2007

Congratulations to Natasha Trethewey on winning the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, Native Guard (2006).

She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the geographic base of this collection. Some of the poems are tributes to her mother who died when Trethewey was a teen. Many of the poems are written as letters and diary entries by African-American Union soldiers stationed on Ship Island near Gulfport during the Civil War. The narrator is ironically an ex-slave who guards captured white Confederate soldiers.

Natasha Trethewey’s own background—growing up in Mississippi as the biracial child of an African-American mother and white father—is a factor in some of the poems in her three collections. Also, her father, Eric Trethewey, is the author of five collections of poetry and the 1990 winner of the Virginia Prize for Poetry.

She is no stranger to honors for her poetry. Her first collection, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove (former U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995) to be the first winner of Cave Canem’s poetry prize in 1999. Among the many awards that followed are the Margaret Walker Award for poetry, the Grolier Prize, the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Memorial Award for poetry, the Julia Peterkin Award at Converse College, the Bunting and Guggenheim fellowships, and the Distinguished Young Alumna Award at the University of Massachusetts.

Her second poetry collection is Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University.