Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey

Overview

Jake Adam York and Natasha Trethewey discuss psychological geographies, southern regions, music and form in writing, estrangement and familiarity in poetry, self and the city in an interview recorded in Decatur, Georgia, on May 13, 2010.

"Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey" 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.

Interview with Natasha Trethewey

Part 2: Trethewey discusses “Signs, Oakvale, Missisippi, 1941” and “Flounder” as well as landscapes in Gulfport and New Orleans

Part 3: Trethewey discusses “Monument,” “Elegy for the Native Guards,” “Providence,” “Prodigal I,” and the documentary impulse

Part 4: Trethewey discusses “Secular,” “Saturday Drive,” “Collection Day,” “Saturday Matinee,” and photographs as family artifacts

Part 5: Trethewey discusses “Graveyard Blues,” “Myth,” “Incident,” “Theories of Time and Space,” as well as music and/as poetry

Part 6: Trethewey discusses Atlanta as retreat and homecoming as well as Decatur and place’s possession of memory

Part 7: Trethewey discusses “Miscegenation,” “The South,” “Saturday Matinee,” “Elegy,” “Mexico,” “The Book of Castas” and new work

About Natasha Trethwey

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. Natasha 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.

About Jake Adam York

Raised near Gadsden in northeast Alabama by his steelworker father and his mother, a history teacher, Jake Adam York studied architecture and English at Auburn University. He received an M.F.A. and a PhD in creative writing and English literature from Cornell University. He is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Denver, where he directs the creative writing program. York has published two books of poetry, Murder Ballads (2005), and A Murmuration of Starlings (2008). A third volume, Persons Unknown is forthcoming in October 2010. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Blackbird, Diagram, Greensboro Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and Third Coast. He has also published three pieces, Anniversary, A Field Guide to Northeast Alabama, and In the Queen City: A Reading at the Gadsden Public Library, as part of the Southern Spaces series Poets in Place.