Overview
In this three-part poem, Natasha Trethewey revisits the Gulf Coast of her father, "a stranger passing through to somewhere else."
Geography is part of the Poets in Place series, a Research Collaboration in the Humanities initiative funded through Emory University’s Presidential Woodruff Fund, in collaboration with the Office of the Provost. Series producers are Natasha Trethewey and Allen Tullos.
Geography
Natasha Trethewey reads her poem "Geography," 2010. Poem text.
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About the Poet
Natasha Trethewey is a professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. Her first collection, Domestic Work, won the 1999 Cave Canem prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In 2003, her second collection Bellocq's Ophelia won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her third collection, Native Guard. Her latest work, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf, was released in 2010. Natasha serves as a producer for the Southern Spaces series Poets in Place, in which she has published three previous pieces, Congregation, Elegy for the Native Guards and Theories of Time and Space.
Recommended Resources
Trethewey, Natasha. Bellocq's Ophelia. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2002.
———. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
———. Domestic Work. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2000.
———. Native Guard. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Links
2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2007-Poetry.
NPR Interview with Terry Gross
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99474984.
PBS NewsHour Interview with Jeffrey Brown
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june07/trethewey_04-25.html.
Poets.org entry for Natasha Trethewey
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/natasha-trethewey.
