Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in several volumes of Best American Poetry, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. She has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Georgia, a master's in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Duke University where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies.

Her most recent collection is Native Guard, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

She is the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry and was also named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year.

Online Resources:

NPR/Fresh Air interview w/ Terri Gross

Selected Bibliography:

Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006)

Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf Press 2002)

Domestic Work (Graywolf Press 2000)