Natasha Trethewey (1966-) is one of the most celebrated contemporary American poets of the last twenty years. Her poetry is recognized for its formal inventiveness and deep explorations of the legacy of race and prejudice in American history. She writes about subjects ranging from Black Civil War veterans to historical portraits of mixed-race families, switching comfortably between contemporary free verse and older forms like the sonnet and villanelle. Her writing has often been praised for closely investigating the intersection of political power and personal freedom, as it blends historical events and personal stories. Describing the wide scope of Trethewey's work, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Marilyn Nelson said, “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.”
Trethewey was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi, to a Black mother and white Canadian father. After her parents' divorce, she divided her time between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia. She attended the University of Georgia for her undergraduate degree and went on to receive an MA from Hollins University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Trethewey's first collection, Domestic Work (2000), intimately portrays working-class Black families in the South. Partially influenced by the life of Trethewey's grandmother, the book zooms in on its characters, capturing seemingly minor scenes from their home lives and jobs. The book was praised for Trethewey's particularly vivid rendition of the Southern setting and its striking natural elements. The book received several major awards, including the Cave Canem Prize, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her next collection, Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), recounted episodes in the life of a New Orleans prostitute. Inspired by the photography of E.J. Bellocq and set in the early 1900s, the collection evocatively paints New Orleans' red light district while simultaneously examining the lives of the mixed-race women who worked there. Trethewey commented that the book was a result of her careful period research as well as her own experience as a biracial woman from the South.
Trethewey's major critical recognition came after the publication of her third book, Native Guard (2006). The collection derives its title from the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army during the American Civil War. In the title poem, Trethewey highlights the thankless sacrifice of these soldiers, writing a sequence of sonnets from the perspective of a member of this regiment. In the other sections of the book, she depicts her childhood, hate crimes in the Reconstruction-era South, and her parents' interracial marriage. Like her previous works, Native Guard shows a pressing concern for the preservation of history, particularly the stories of marginalized individuals. In 2007, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her fourth book, Thrall (2012), looks at historical portraits of mixed-race families, with a period focus on the 18th century. Trethewey explores the hidden difficulties that these individuals encountered as they existed between social worlds. Her most recent collection, Monument (2018), is a compilation of her older work with some more recent poems about historical monuments. It was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry. She has also published a memoir about her mother, Memorial Drive (2020), and a creative nonfiction book about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Trethewey has also received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. From 2012 to 2014, she served as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States. She currently teaches at Northwestern University.
