Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is an American poet and memoirist who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, to a Black mother and a white father—a marriage that was illegal in Mississippi at the time—she was shaped by the racial history of her home state and the traumatic murder of her mother by her stepfather when Trethewey was nineteen. She studied at the University of Georgia, Hollins University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Trethewey's poetry collections include Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006)—which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—and Thrall (2012). Her memoir Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (2020) is an account of her mother's life, her murder, and Trethewey's long reckoning with its aftermath. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2021 and was hailed as both a literary masterpiece and an important document of racial violence and its human cost. Trethewey is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.