Staff

A reminder to the campus community: Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey will speak at next Tuesday’s Convocation at 11:10 a.m. in Memorial Chapel.

Trethewey, whose talk is entitled The Muse of History: On Poetry and Social Justice, has combined her mixed-race background and profound writing skills to convey the plight of the southern black woman. Her first collection of poems, Domestic Work (2000), detailed working-class lives and jobs and won the Cave Canem Prize for a first book by an African American poet. In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard (2006), an exploration of death and war. Other acclaimed works include Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), a fictional narrative of prostitution in 1900s New Orleans; Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi (2010), a non-fiction collection; and Thrall (2012), an examination of mixed-race fathers and children.

In 2012, Trethewey was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and also has held teaching positions at Duke University, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and Yale University.

Trethewey earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

An informal question-and-answer session will immediately follow the Convocation in the Chapel.