Natasha Trethewey will read and discuss her work April 17th 7:00 p.m. at Traditions
Hall on the University of South Florida Tampa campus. The 2007
Pulitzer Prize winner accepted the award for her third poetry collection, Native Guard, published in 2006. It contains her poems about black Union soldiers
who guarded a fort off the coast of Mississippi during the U. S.
Civil War.


Her first work, Domestic Work, was selected by Rita Dove to receive
the inaugural 1999 Cave
Canem poetry prize for the best first book by an African
American poet and also received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for
Poetry and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize.
Her second work, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) received the 2003
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize. She is the
recipient of the prestigious Bunting fellowship from the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.


Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey holds a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins
University, and an M.F. A. in poetry from the University of
Massachusetts. She is the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair, and
professor of poetry at Emory University


This event is sponsored by the USF Humanities Institute, the departments of English
and Women’s Studies, and USF Women in Leadership and Philanthropy.