| 1 | Name: | Professor Natasha Trethewey | |
| Institution: | Northwestern University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1966 | ||
Natasha Trethewey currently serves as the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2013. She earned her B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1989, her M.A. from Hollins University in 1991, and her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1995. Trethewey is an exceptional poet and writer. Her works focus on problematic episodes in the American South and, more particularly, the Gulf Coast - and in her own family history. Thus, the themes of her poetry - ordinary lives in the Jim Crow South, Black soldiers in the Civil War, the life of a New Orleans sex worker, the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, and, most recently, the difficult life and traumatic death of her mother, which led Trethewey to become a poet. During her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey created a section of the PBS NewsHour, "Where Poetry Lives." As one critic has written, "A sense of justice made urgent by loss continues to underpin her work, which entwines historical narrative and lived experience, refusing to diminish either. Her poetry speaks plain truth rendered in forms strong enough to hold contradictions and sometimes devastating complexities." Trethewey's bibliography includes: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006), Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), Thrall (2012), Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018), and Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (2020). Among numerous awards, she was the 2003 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2007 recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2017 recipient of the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the 2018 recipient of the Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Letters since 2019, and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |||