Native Guard

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. Read more →