"Inside Gwinnett" Natasha Trethewey Article

Meet the “Gwinnett Reads” Author: Natasha Trethewey

September 21, 2012   Blogs & Contributions, Features

By Lee Brewer Jones / Georgia Perimeter College

Natasha Trethewey, the 2012 “Gwinnett Reads” author of Thrall and Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. Her mother was American, and her father was a legal immigrant from Canada. Yet baby Natasha was “illegal” in the state where she was born.
How, you may ask, can this be? The answer lies in pre-Civil Rights era laws against “miscegenation.” Natasha’s mother, Gwendolyn, was African-American, or in 1966 Mississippi Birth Certificate parlance, “colored.” Her father, poet Eric Trethewey, is a white man. One year later, the United States Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, ruled unconstitutional any laws banning interracial marriage.
Eric and Gwendolyn divorced during Natasha’s childhood, and she moved, more or less uneasily, between the black and white worlds of her parents. Natasha’s awareness of Southern history and her various identities in it was heightened by the odd coincidence of her birth date, April 26, 1966, being the actual centennial of Confederate Memorial Day. When an abusive ex-husband murdered Gwendolyn in 1985, during Natasha’s freshman year at the University of Georgia, the young woman began expressing her tortured selves and her pain in prose and in what she later characterized as “really bad poems.”
Fortunately for us, Natasha Trethewey persevered through an A.B. at UGA, an M.A. at Hollins University (where her father teaches), and an M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts. Along the way, she honed the poetic style Rita Dove characterized as “reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes” when Dove selected Trethewey’s first volume of poetry, Domestic Work, as winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Domestic Work also garnered the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
After 2002’s Bellocq’s Ophelia won additional awards, Trethewey unexpectedly learned of the Louisiana Native Guards, a group of black Union soldiers who protected a fort holding Confederate captives. While Southern history had commemorated Gulfport Confederates’ roles in the Civil War, no plaque or memorial existed for the Native Guards. Trethewey was moved to write 2006’s Native Guard: Poems, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Although Natasha Trethewey is only 46 years old, the Library of Congress selected her this past June as United States Poet Laureate. She is the first Southerner given the honor since Robert Penn Warren and the first African-American since Rita Dove.
Trethewey’s newest work, Thrall, has only recently debuted to an eager public. Just as earlier volumes did, Thrall draws us to sometimes uncomfortable topics regarding our nation’s complicated racial history, which Trethewey herself represents in microcosm. To Trethewey, such nearly forgotten terms as “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “mestizo” still echo with meaning. Sometimes she presents freedom itself as transient or unavailable, predetermined by skin color and perceptions.
As you read and hear Trethewey read from Thrall on October 7, expect to be challenged. Better yet, expect to think.