Release date: April 16, 2007
Contact: Beverly Cox Clark at 404-712-8780 or beverly.clark@emory.edu

Emory Poet Trethewey Wins 2007 Pulitzer Prize

Renowned poet and Emory University associate professor of English Natasha Trethewey has been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She received the Pulitzer for "Native Guard" (2006, Houghton Mifflin).

A native of Gulfport, Miss., Trethewey's "Native Guard" draws on her personal experience and Southern history. Growing up in the South, Trethewey was never told that in her hometown, black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units. (To hear her read from "Native Guard," go to southernspaces.org ).

The title poem imagines the life of a former slave stationed at the fort, who is charged with writing letters home for the illiterate or invalid POWs and his fellow soldiers. Just as he becomes the guard of Ship Island's memory, Trethewey recalls her own childhood as the daughter of a black woman and a white man. Her parents' marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South.

The Pulitzer Prize is the most recent honor for the acclaimed poet. Trethewey's first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), 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 The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000, 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 B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. 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.

Related Information

The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey and Janet McAdams ’96PhD ( Emory Magazine: Winter 2002)

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