Next Poet Laureate is Multiracial
The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that
the next poet laureate is Natasha
Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a
professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46,
was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since
Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since
Rita Dove in 1993.
“I’m still a little in disbelief,” Ms. Trethewey said
on Monday.
Unlike the recent laureates W.
S. Merwin and her immediate predecessor, Philip
Levine, both in their 80s when appointed, Ms. Trethewey, who will officially
take up her duties in September, is still in midcareer and not well-known
outside poetry circles. Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms
like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of
America. Her fourth collection, “Thrall,” is scheduled to appear in the fall.
She is also the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A
Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”
In a phone interview from her home in Decatur, Ga.,
where she lives with her husband, Brett Gadsden, a history professor at Emory,
Ms. Trethewey explained that the Civil War has fascinated her since childhood,
and that she eventually came to feel that she embodied some of its
contradictions. “My birthday is April 26th, Confederate Memorial Day,” she said.
“I was born 100 years to the day after that holiday was invented. I don’t think
I could have escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented.”
As one of her poems explains, Ms. Trethewey is the
product of a union that was still a crime in Mississippi when her parents
married: her mother was black and her father was white. Years later, after her
mother’s death, she came across her own birth certificate and saw that the line
for the race of her mother says, “colored,” the race of her father, “Canadian.”
“That’s how language works — how we change and rewrite
ourselves,” she said.
Source: NY Times, Charles McGrath
That's awesome! Great that we have multiracial role models excelling at just about everything these days!
ReplyDeleteCongrats to Ms. Trethewey, but I must confess to feeling a bit saddened to see the departure of Philip Levine as poet laureate. Having said that, best wishes to the multi-talented AND multiracial Natasha Trethewey!
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