Natasha Trethewey

This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born father and her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she was born, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when she was young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19, her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’s words, “I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened.” Trethewey’s poetry is unique for the manner in which she fuses historical materials and vernacular language with traditional verse forms. In Bellocq’s Ophelia, she imagines the inner life of an anonymous prostitute immortalized by the New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. In 2007, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book Native Guard, a verse narrative inspired by a black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War.