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Natasha Trethewey

Board of Trustees Professor of English; Director of Creative Writing; Director of Graduate Studies, Litowitz Graduate Program in Creative Writing (MFA+MA)

M.F.A. University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Biography

Please direct external inquiries to katharine.johnsen@northwestern.edu.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006)for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018); a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and a memoir, Memorial Drive (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress.


Specializations

Creative Writing

Books

The House of Being
The House of Being (Yale University Press, 2024)
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser
The Essential Muriel Rukeyser  (Ecco Press, 2021)
Monument: Poems New & Selected
Monument: Poems New & Selected (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)
Best American Poetry 2017
Best American Poetry 2017 (Scribner, 2017)
Thrall: Poems
Thrall: Poems (Mariner Books, 2012)
Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press , 2010)
Native Guard: Poems
Native Guard: Poems (Mariner Books , 2006)
Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems
Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2002)
Domestic Work: Poems
Domestic Work: Poems  (Graywolf Press, 2000)