Meet Natasha Trethewey, USA Poet Laureate

I don't know about you, but I hadn't heard of the new USA Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, when she was appointed, so I hope the attached article and example of her poetry is a help. 

Quote by reporter David Biespiel: HERE

View full sizeRogelio V. Solis/The Associated Press

For some years, I have felt that the new U.S. poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, is the most Heaney-esque of American poets. So the other day I was delighted to read that she tipped her hat to the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney and identified him as a major influence on her art. In her sense of place, in her sense decorum and in her sense of morality, Trethewey is a major American writer of the poetry of poise. 

Like Heaney, Trethewey writes with both a landscape and a locality in mind -- one that is in the present and in history at the same time. Though Heaney digs into the bog-scape of Gaelic lore and Ireland's modernity, Trethewey's poems dovetail with the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction-era South. America's historic public black and white divide mirrors Trethewey's own private biography -- a mixed-race Southerner born 100 years after the end of the Civil War with an African American mother and a white father. 

Read more (including her poem, Flounder) HERE

***

Poet Laureate to Write Memoir

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: July 1, 2012

Natasha Trethewey, the newly named United States poet laureate, will write a memoir, her publisher said. Ms. Trethewey, below, a Mississippi born African-American who is the first Southerner to be appointed poet laureate since Robert Penn Warren, chose Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, as her publisher after a heated auction. She will begin as poet laureate in September. The book maps “the intersections of personal and cultural history as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and race in America,” her publisher said. Daniel Halpern, the president and publisher of Ecco, said in a statement: “I can’t remember a more emotionally intense auction for a book, ever. I truly admire Natasha’s spirit, her graceful presence on these pages, which tell a story that no one is likely to forget.” The book is tentatively scheduled for release in 2014.