Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Native Guard” (2006) — for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize — and more recently “Monument: Poems New and Selected” (2018); “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010), a book of nonfiction; “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir,” (2020) an instant New York Times bestseller; and “The House of Being” (2024), a meditation on writing. 

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017, she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress and she was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2022. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, she has also served on the boards of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hollins University, and currently serves on the board for the Pulitzer Prize. At Northwestern University she is the Board of Trustees Professor of English.

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Natasha Trethewey: A Message of ‘Carrying On’ Through Loss and Letters