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
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.
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.
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.
divorced time
My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.
encouragement
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
begin
When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
attempts drafts took wrote
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.
poetry
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
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.
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.
necessary poetry utterance
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
bad found hold losing months people poems poetry tried turning wrote
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
call forget kids looks word
When kids look at broccoli, they call it 'little trees,' because they see it not just for the word 'broccoli.' They see it for what it looks like, the image. We, as adults, forget to think like that. We forget to think figuratively and have to be reminded.
entirety imagining interested kinds life looking research woman
The entirety of 'Bellocq's Ophelia' was a project, and I was interested in doing research and looking at photographs and writing about them, imagining this woman Ophelia and what her life was like and the kinds of things she thought about.