Natasha Trethewey 1966
------------------------------------------ Natasha Trethewey at 2008 Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Photo by Nancy Jacobs Natasha Trethewey was the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry and the 2008 Mississippi Governor's
Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry. Natasha Trethewey:
A Biography Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi, to Eric Trethewey (also a poet) and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough Trethewey. Before Trethewey started grade school, her parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to Decatur, Georgia. Her mother married Joel Grimmette. In her poetry Trethewey sometimes writes about her mother (who was killed by Grimmette in 1985 when Natasha was nineteen) and her own experiences as the daughter of a white father and a black mother growing up in the South. As a child, Trethewey spent her summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and in New Orleans with her father. She has always loved words and even at a young age spent much of her time in a library reading as many books as possible. Her father first inspired her to write poetry. After high school, Trethewey earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Georgia in English and creative writing. She earned her Master's degree in English and creative writing at Hollins University, where her father is a professor of English and the author of three collections of poems himself. Later she went to the University of Massachusetts from which she received her M.F.A. in poetry (Gale). Natasha Trethewey with her father, poet Eric Trethewey, at 2008 Mississippi Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Photo by Nancy Jacobs Trethewey's work has been published in numerous anthologies
and magazines. She has published two collections of poetry:
Domestic Work and Bellocq's Ophelia.
Her current work in progress is called Native Guard
(SEE UPDATE UPDATE: Natasha Trethewey currently holds
the Phyllis Wheatley Distinguished Chair and is Professor of
Poetry in the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.
In addition to having taught at Auburn University, she has taught
at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, and Duke University
(where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor
of Documentary and American Studies). Natasha also serves as
a producer for the Southern Spaces series Poets
in Place, in which she has published two pieces,
Elegy for the Native Guards and Theories of Time
and Space. Her book of creative non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf, was published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2010. She will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in the spring 2011. Her new collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the fall 2012. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Review of Bellocq's
Ophelia The book Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey is full of free verse poems, written as letters and diary entries. Trethewey brings to life a New Orleans prostitute named Ophelia. The character actually originated from a photograph taken by E. J. Bellocq in the early 1900's. The photographs taken by E. J. Bellocq featured women prostitutes in New Orleans, but their names are unknown. These photographs inspired Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia. The setting is in New Orleans, Louisiana, and spans the years of 1910 to 1912. Ophelia is a mulatto who originally lived in Mississippi but moved to New Orleans when her money began running low. Some of the letters Ophelia wrote were to her former teacher Miss Constance Wright. She explains what her life is like in New Orleans. Later on, Ophelia explains that she has found work as a prostitute at parlor owned by a woman named Countess P. As Ophelia continues to write Miss Constance, she describes her work environment, her co-workers, and her customers. One particular customer she mentions a lot is E.J. Bellocq. She explains how he visits the parlor often and only buys enough time to take pictures. Ophelia was not only a model for Bellocq but soon became his apprentice. Soon she starts to see her environment and people the way a photographer does. As I read Ophelia's letters from Storyville, I was shocked at some of the things that took place in the parlor. I was also amazed at the fact that Ophelia was not ashamed of what she did for a living. While reading this book, I have a few questions that I couldn't find the answer to. However, I did enjoy reading Bellocq's Ophelia. The poems were not like what I thought they were going to be. I thought that every poem was going to rhyme and be hard to follow, but it wasn't. Trethewey's poems were easy to read and to understand. I would encourage everyone to read at least one collection of poems by Natasha Trethewey. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE Poets.org has biography and some poems by Trethewey. Natasha Trethewey's faculty page at Emory has bio, photos from her Pulitzer Prize party, and links to videos. Online News hour on PBS has information and poems from Poetry Series. Native
Daughter:
an interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON of the New York
Times. Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey in Southern Spaces. Read poems written by Natasha Trethewey.
RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
Rangus, Eric. "Trethewey's Ophelia". Emory Report. 7 Oct. 2002. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002. Etheridge, Eric. Trethewey, Natasha. Bellocq's Ophelia. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2002. --------------------------------------------------------- Photos above by Nancy Jacobs, 2004 |
Throughout
Trethewey's career, she has received many awards, including
grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and
a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts to continue her work on Bellocq's Ophelia,
(poems based on her work as a graduate student about photographs
of prostitutes in the 1900's in New Orleans). For "Storyville
Diary" she won the Grolier Poetry Prize. In 1999, she
was selected by Rita Dove to receive the Cave Canem Poetry Prize
for the best first book by an African American poet for Domestic
Work , which was published in the fall of 2000 by Graywolf
Press. In 2001, she received the Mississippi Institute of Arts
and Letters Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for poetry.
She received the prestigious Bunting fellowship from the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She
has received money from the Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund
award. Other awards that Trethewey has received include
the Margaret Walker Award for poetry, the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell
Memorial Award 
for
poetry, the Julia Peterkin Award at Converse College, and the
Distinguished Young Alumna Award at the University of Massachusetts
(Gale).
BELOW) and is a collection of letter poems by black guardsmen
who were once stationed at Gulfport, Mississippi. In addition
to Trethewey's father Eric being a poet, her stepmother also
has published collections of poetry (Emory Report). Trethewey
taught as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University
in Alabama before accepting her current position as an assistant
professor of English, poetry, and creative writing at
Emory University in Decatur, Georgia. 
In
her diary entries, she explains the first time she met
her father. Her mother told her that a white man was her
father and that he was the one who named her. Ophelia
explains how she tried to impress her father when she was young.
Now she fears that one day a man will walk into her room,
not just as a customer but as a father too. The remaining
entries are about Bellocq and the photographs he takes of her.
Actor/director
Stuart Margolin (best known as "Angel" in James Garner's
Rockford Files) and Natasha Trethewey. Photo
left and below by Nancy Jacobs. Natchez Literary Festival, 2004
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