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.”