Description
This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as
United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the
position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the
Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs
of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading.
With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the
complexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born father
and her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she was
born, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Court
legalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when she
was young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with her
grandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19,
her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’s words, “I turned
to poetry to make sense of what had happened.”
Trethewey’s poetry is unique for the manner in which she fuses historical materials
and vernacular language with traditional verse forms. In Bellocq’s Ophelia, she
imagines the inner life of an anonymous prostitute immortalized by the New
Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. In 2007, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her
book Native Guard, a verse narrative inspired by a black regiment of the Union
Army during the Civil War.
Andrew Young was the pastor of a small country church when he faced down the Ku Klux Klan to organize a voter registration drive in South Georgia. He became the leading negotiator for the national Civil Rights Movement, enduring death threats, beatings and jail time to win for African Americans...
Published 03/14/19
When Desmond Tutu became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he used his pulpit to decry the apartheid system of racial segregation. The South African government revoked his passport to prevent him from traveling, but Bishop Tutu refused to be silenced. International...
Published 03/14/19