Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser (2021), Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2015-2016, she served as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, and in 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Natasha Trethewey’s many honors and awards also include:
2021 – Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction
2021 – Cora Norman Award, Mississippi Humanities Council
2019 – Friend of History Award, Organization of American Historians
2018 – Bearing Witness Fellow, Art for Justice Fund/Ford Foundation
2018 – Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature, Mercer University
2018 – Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars Program
2018 – Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, University of Exeter
2017 – Election to Membership, Society of American Historians
2016 – Hall Waters Prize for Southern Literature
2016 – Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Duke University
2014 – Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Columbia University
2013 – The North Star Award, Hurston-Wright Foundation
2012 – Hermitage Residency, National Artist Advisory Committee
2012 – Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence, Hollins University
2011 – Induction, Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame, University of Georgia Libraries
2009 – Election to Membership, The Fellowship of Southern Writers
2008 – Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, the Mississippi Arts Commission
2008 – Georgia Woman of the Year, Georgia Commission on Women
2005 – Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, for “Pilgrimage” and “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi”
2000 – Poetry Fellowship, Alabama State Council on the Arts
2000 – Distinguished Young Alumna Award, University of Massachusetts
1999 – Grolier Poetry Prize, The Grolier Bookstore and the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Foundation
1998 – Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize, The American Poetry Review