Emory Professor is U.S. Poet Laureate
An Emory University writing professor was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate today. The Library of Congress bestowed the honor on Natasha Trethewey, a Mississippi native and Pulitzer Prize winner. After winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems “Native Guard,” about a black Civil War regiment, Trethewey explained to WABE how she gets inspired to write.
“Certainly, inspiration comes,” she says, “And I think of that as sort of ‘gifts from the muses,’ when they arrive unbidden like that. But in order to get them to come, I read other people’s poems.”
When Trethewey was a freshman in college, her mother was killed by her ex-husband. She said she wrote poems to deal with the pain.
“Those earliest attempts were to try to deal with that tremendous grief,” she explains, “I think like people after 9/11 wrote poems to deal with what seemed to be unspeakable. We don’t often write the best poems in those moments, but we often turn to poetry.”
As poet laureate, Trethewey’s responsibilities will include public readings across the country and promotion of poetry in schools. Trethewey is the country’s first Southern poet laureate since Robert Penn Warren was tapped as the first in 1986.
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