Natasha Trethewey to Read for the Cropper Writers' Series

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Comes to USD

Take a journey through the depths of the deep South this Friday with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, whose body work has been described as “muscular, luminous poems (that) explore the complex memory of the American South.”

She’ll take the stage at USD as the focus of the Cropper Writers’ Series; her most recent collection of poems, Native Guard, explores the story of one of the first black regiments to fight during the Civil War. The work is said to be “both a pilgrimage and an elegy,” in which Trethewey “skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices.”

Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Native Guard, becoming on the fourth African American to win the esteemed award. The book includes passages that honor her mother and recalls her parent’s interracial marriage, which was still illegal in 1966 in Mississippi. The poet brings a tremendous strength to the Cropper Writers’ series through her work, which focuses on the public and personal aspects of ancestral remembrance.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.sandiego.edu/insideusd/?p=2331