As part of the Feb. 11 mini-symposium "Learning the Lessons of America's Racial Past through History and Literature" Longwood hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey gave a reading at 7:30 p.m. The mini-symposium was organized by Dr. Martha Cook, professor of English; Dr. Larissa Fergeson, associate professor of history; and Lonnie Calhoun, director of multicultural affairs and international student services. It was funded by the American Democracy Project, Longwood University and Lancer Productions and co-sponsored by the Black Student Association, the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the Robert Russa Moton Museum, and the Call Me MISTER Program.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Miss. Before she started grade school, Trethewey's parents divorced and she moved to Decatur, Ga., with her mother. As a youth, Trethewey spent her summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and in New Orleans with her father. She has always loved words and even at a young age spent much of her time in a library reading as many books as possible. In 1985, when Trethewey was 19, her mother passed away.
She got her bachelor of arts in English from the University of Georgia and her master of arts in English and creative writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, Va.. Her father, the person to whom she attributes her interest in poetry, is a poetry professor at Hollins University. "A lot has to do with my dad. He always encouraged me to write poetry, especially on long car rides," said Trethewey. Her father also encouraged her to go to graduate school for poetry. She got her master of fine arts in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.
Her first poetry collection, "Domestic Work," won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, "Bellocq's Ophelia" received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association.
Her work has appeared in several volumes of "Best American Poetry," and in journals such as "Agni," "American Poetry Review," "Callaloo," "Gettysburg Review," "Kenyon Review," "New England Review" and "The Southern Review," among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also received an induction into the Fellowship of Southern Writers as its first female African-American member.
Her most recent collection is "Native Guard," released in 2006, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry and was also named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year.
She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies. She is now the Phyllis Wheatley Distinguished Chair and Professor of Poetry at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga..
Trethewey's poems are filled with historical references that pertain to her own life. As a child born to a black mother and white father in the mid-60s in racially divided Mississippi, Trethewey experienced her share of prejudice and racial hatred. She was born in a time when an interracial marriage was illegal in the state. He parents had to secretly wed, and since their marriage was not recognized Trethewey was technically an illegitimate child. Trethewey understood what it was like to be looked at as a "half-breed" or "mulatto," as one of her poems states.
Trethewey and her parents lived with her grandmother for a while. A local church parked their van on her grandmother's driveway to register blacks to vote. A cross was burned by the Ku Klux Klan in her yard, and Trethewey said she was never sure whether it was due to the voter registration, the interracial marriage or both. Some of her other works include her experience of having a cross burned by the KKK in her yard and the after-effects of Katrina in her home state of Mississippi.
"My inspiration comes from history. I'm really interested in history, what gets left out, what we remember, how we remember. What we make statues for and what we don't," said Trethewey.
