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Natasha Trethewey

Biography

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is a former U.S. poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection NATIVE GUARD.

Natasha Trethewey

Books by Natasha Trethewey

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
by Natasha Trethewey - Memoir, Nonfiction

At age 19, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. In MEMORIAL DRIVE, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet explores this profound experience of pain, loss and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.