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Congratulations to Southern Native Natasha Trethewey

July 15, 2012

In June of this year, Natasha Trethewey was named the nation’s nineteenth US Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress.  Born in Gulfport, MI on April 26, 1966, Trethewey is among the youngest  in this elite group and the first to represent the South since Robert Penn Warren received the honor in 1986.  She is also Poet Laureate of Mississippi and in 2007 won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard.  

Inspired by her parents’ interracial marriage, family tragedy, history, and widespread suffering along the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina, Trethewey’s work is heavily laden with themes of mixed race, memory, human tragedies, forgotten history, and the racial legacy of America.

Currently a professor of English and creative writing at Emory University, in January 2013, Trethewey will  be the first poet laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C. where she will work in the Poets Room of the Libary’s Poetry and Literature Center.  Trethewey succeeds US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and joins this elite circle of distinguished artists including Billy Collins, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Ted Kooser, and Kay Ryan to name a few.  Ms. Trethewey will kick off her term this fall with a reading of her work on September 13th in the Coolidge Auditorium.

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Category: Contemporary Poetry
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2012 at 12:00 am. Both comments and pings are currently closed.



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  • Editor’s Note

    The number one question our editors receive is—what do the editors and judges look for when judging the contest? The number one answer we give is creativity. Unlike prose, writing composed in everyday language, poetry is considered a creative art and requires a different type of effort and a certain level of depth. Of the thousands of poems entered in each contest, the ones that catch our judges’ eyes are the ones that remove us, even just slightly, from the scope of everyday life by using language that is interesting, specific, vivid, obscure, compelling, figurative, and so on. Oftentimes, poems are pulled aside for a second look based simply on certain words that intrigued the reader. So first and foremost, be sure your poetry is written using creative language. Take general ideas and make them personal. In his infamous book De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong, W. D. Snodgrass imparts, “We cannot honestly discuss or represent our lives, any more than our poems, without using ideational language.”

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