UTSA to host Nov. 16 reading by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

By Kris Rodriguez
Public Affairs Specialist

(Nov. 8, 2012) -- The UTSA Creative Writing Program in the Department of English will host the nation's newly appointed Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as featured speaker in the Fall 2012 Creative Writing Reading Series at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Nov. 16 in the University Center Denman Room (2.01.28) on the UTSA Main Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Trethewey was selected as the 19th poet laureate of the United States last June while serving as poet laureate of Mississippi. She will read from her published works including her most recently poetry collection, "Thrall" (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). Her third collection of poems, "Native Guard" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.

Her second collection "Bellocq's Ophelia" (Graywolf, 2002) received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize in 2003 and was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes and the Notable Book by the American Library Association in 2003. Her first poetry collection, "Domestic Work" (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1995 Cave Canem poetry prize, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and Lillian Smith Award for Poetry, both in 2001.

In 2011, Trethewey was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and in 2009, she was honored by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She was named Georgia Woman of the Year in 2008 and received the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Additionally, she received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Trethewey's poems focus on examining memory and the racial legacy of America and have appeared in several volumes of "Best American Poetry" and in the journals Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review and The Southern Review.

In the 2005-2006 academic year, Trethewey was the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She also was the James Weldon Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2009.

Trethewey lives in Atlanta and is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

For more information, visit the UTSA Creative Writing Program website.