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About the Program | Faculty | Students | Reading Series | Calendar | Writers' Resources

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Faculty

Natasha Trethewey Professor of English Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry N209 Callaway Center Creative Writing Program Emory University 537 Kilgo Circle Atlanta, GA 30322  404-727-4683 (Office) 404-727-4672 (Fax) creativewriting@emory.edu (e-mail) Spring 2010 office hours: By appointment

Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), 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 has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. 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 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 was a 2009-2010 James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library.

Her most recent collection is Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Her book of creative non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (September 2010), and her new collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2012.

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 will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in Spring 2011.

Watch a video of Natasha Trethewey's reading at Emory University on May 8, 2007 in honor of her Pulitzer Prize. (Real Player is required.)

See photos from the May 8 dinner and reading:

http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos.html

http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos2.html

http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos3.html

Interviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross:

July 16, 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12003278

January 20, 2009: Natasha Trethewey was featured in a special Inauguration Day
edition of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." Trethewey, who attended the inauguration, talks with
host Terri Gross about the significance of the day for the country's -- and her own -- racial history, and reads "My Mother Dreams Another Country" from her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, Native Guard, and recites Langston Hughes' powerful verse, "I, Too, Sing America. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99474984

Watch two videos of Natasha Trethewey reading her poetry:

"Theories of Time and Space"

"Elegy for the Native Guards"

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Domestic Work

Bellocq's Ophelia

Native Guard

Native Guard Giftset with CD

Beyond Katrina

 

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Limen

All day I've listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,

his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother's face.

She is there, again, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line -- each one

a thin white screen between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I'm sure
he must be looking for something else -- not simply

the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he's been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.