Author of the week: Natasha Trethewey

last updated 8 January 2015

U.S. poets laureate don’t come much younger than Natasha Trethewey, said Charles McGrath in The New York Times. After tapping two octogenarians in succession—Philip Levine and W.S. Merwin—the Library of Congress announced on June 7 that the 46-year-old Trethewey would occupy the honorary post beginning in September. The Mississippi native has spent decades, though, perfecting her voice. She came to poetry at age 19 through tragedy, after her mother was murdered by an ex-husband. “I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened,” she says. “It took me nearly 20 years to find the right language, to write poems that were successful enough to explain my own feelings to me and that might also be meaningful to others.”

Many of Trethewey’s poems describe attempts to recover history. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning 2006 collection, Native Guard, focuses on black Civil War soldiers who guarded Confederate prisoners, and speaks as well about the effort to recover memories of her mother. “In dreams you live,” she writes. “You’ll be dead again tomorrow.” Trethewey will be the first laureate from the South since Robert Penn Warren and the first African-American laureate since Rita Dove, two decades ago. She admits that the honor wasn’t entirely unexpected. “One needs to admit it’s something that crosses the mind,” she says. Still, her first thought when she saw “Library of Congress” on her caller ID was that someone was pulling a prank. “I thought to myself, ‘Really?’”