Natasha trethewey father

Natasha trethewey sonnet
Eric trethewey
Natasha trethewey mother

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Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016). She is currently serving as the Artist in Residence at the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience.

Trethewey is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser (2021), Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017.

She is the recipient of fel

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Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey served as poet laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Her collection Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007.

Trethewey’s works forge a rich intersection between the historical and autobiographical. In poems that are polished, controlled, and often based on traditional forms, Trethewey grapples with the dualities and oppositions that define her personal history: Black and white, native and outsider, rural and urban, the memorialized and the forgotten. The daughter of a Black mother and a white father, Trethewey grew up in a South still segregated by custom, if not by law, and her life astride the color line has inspired her recovery of lost histories, public and private.

Early Life and Career

Although Trethewey has spent much of her life in Georgia, she maintains deep roots in her native Mississippi, where she was born on April 26, 1966, in her mother’s hometown of Gulfport. Her parents, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker, and Eric Trethewey, a poet and Canadian emigrant, met as students at

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Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned an MA in poetry from Hollins University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.

Trethewey’s first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet, and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her other poetry collections are Monument: Poems New and Selected (Houghton Mifflin, 2018), which was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; Thrall (Houghton Mifflin, 2012); Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002).

Trethewey is also the author of the memoirs The House of Being (Yale University Press, 2025) and Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (HarperCollins, 2020).

In her introduction to Domestic Work, Dove said,