Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Tretheweyis an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 April 1966
CountryUnited States of America
necessary poetry utterance
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
frequently grown united
I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.
advocate grassroots kinds people poetry
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
attempts drafts took wrote
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
begin
When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
encouragement
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
black illegal married ohio white
My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.
correct people period time
Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.
became poems poet speaking tables ways
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
haunts historical history intimate relationships ways
'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
work
Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
believe early education helped life metaphor poetical traumatic
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
admirable best deeply genuine poems seems selves writers
Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
born marriages people understanding
I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children.