Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Tretheway is an American novelist and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Native Guard” her 2006 poetry collection. She is the Robert W Woodruff Professor of Creative Writing and English at Emory University, where she is also the Creative Writing Program director. Tretheway was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi which was Confederate Memorial Day. She was born to an interracial couple Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough and Eric Tretheway, whose relationship and marriage were illegal at the time. She was born just a year before the anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the US Supreme Court. Her birth certificate indicated her father’s race as Canadian and her mother as colored. Her mother was a part of the inspiration for her debut work “Native Guard,” given that she was a social worker. When she was still young, her parents got a divorce and then in 1985, her mother was killed by her second husband that she had just divorced. Natasha, who was then a nineteen-year-old, recalls that her reaction to her mother’s death was a determination to become a poet. She thought it was through poetry that she could better understand and articulate her sense of loss and the horror. Tretheway who is a Hollins University professor of English is also a poet.