In 2005-6 she served as the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary and American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta, where she held the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. Trethewey took her first teaching job as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, in 1997. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995, Trethewey was starting to publish, and her work has since appeared in the country’s most prestigious literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry. degree in English and creative writing at Hollins College (later Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied with her father, a professor there. degree at UGA in 1989, and in 1991 she earned an M.A. Nineteen-year-old Trethewey, who was finishing her freshman year at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, where she was an English major and a varsity cheerleader, turned to writing poetry to deal with her grief. In 1984 her mother divorced her second husband, Joel Grimmette a year later, Grimmette shot his ex-wife to death. Trethewey’s young adulthood was ruptured by violence and tragedy. Trethewey also began to write during these years, at her father’s urging. Here she began to discover the complexities of her essential duality-when she was with her father she could pass for white and be treated more equally than when she was among her mother’s people. Her parents, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker, and Eric Trethewey, a poet and Canadian emigrant, met as students at Kentucky State College (later Kentucky State University) in Frankfort and later crossed the state line into Ohio to marry-a situation whose ironies and implications the poet deftly explores in “Miscegenation.”Īfter her parents’ divorce, six-year-old Trethewey moved with her mother to Atlanta, returning every summer to the Gulf Coast, where she split time between the homes of her mother’s family and of her father, who was then living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Early Life and CareerĪlthough Trethewey has spent much of her life in Georgia, she maintains deep roots in her native Mississippi, where she was born on April 26, 1966, in her mother’s hometown of Gulfport. The daughter of a Black mother and a white father, Trethewey grew up in a South still segregated by custom, if not by law, and her life astride the color line has inspired her recovery of lost histories, public and private. In poems that are polished, controlled, and often based on traditional forms, Trethewey grapples with the dualities and oppositions that define her personal history: Black and white, native and outsider, rural and urban, the memorialized and the forgotten.
Trethewey’s works forge a rich intersection between the historical and autobiographical. Her collection Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007.
Natasha Trethewey served as poet laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014.
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