Natasha Trethewey‘s Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir is the gut-wrenching story of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy. The author is joined by decorated poet, playwright, and essayist Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and author of The Light of the World, a memoir about the loss of her husband.
In Conversation: On Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
In Conversation: On Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Author:
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Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard. At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey’s world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she faced unimaginable trauma and now, in Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco) Trethewey explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. Trethewey’s book is a compelling and searching look into the experience of sudden loss and absence, but also a glimpse at the effects of white racism and domestic abuse. The Boston Globe called it “A luminous and searing work.”
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a decorated poet, playwright, essayist, and educator. She is the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. She has also held distinguished professorships at Columbia and at Yale, where she served as the chair of the Department of African American Studies. Her books include the poetry collection “American Sublime” and the memoir “The Light of the World,” both of which were Pulitzer finalists.
