Natasha Trethewey

Monday night's edition of the National Public Radio program Fresh Air featured an 40-minute interview with Natasha Trethewey, the Gulfport, Mississippi, native whose collection Native Guard received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.   It's a terrific interview, even by the high standards set by UB graduate Terry Gross and her staff on that program.

Trethewey discusses growing up as a biracial child in the still segregated South of the late 1960s and reads from "Miscegenation" (one of her best-known poems).  She describes the pressures on her parents'  interracial marriage - still illegal in Mississippi in 1966 when she was born - and the unwelcome attention it drew from the local Klan, which burned a cross on their lawn. 

She also talks about her mother's murder by her second husband (Trethewey's stepfather) in 1985, and explains how she was able to write about it for the first time in Native Guard. Breaking her silence on this family tragedy inspired her to seek out other unwritten narratives of her region's African-American heritage.

Her "Elegy for the Native Guards" is dedicated to the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a regiment of African-American and Creole soldiers (mostly escaped slaves and free men), who were formed under the Confederacy, but eventually fought on the side of the Union in the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana during the Civil War.  They were stationed on Ship Island, just outside Trethewey's native Gulfport, though she never learned of their existence until her years as a graduate fellow at Radcliffe.

I picked up a copy of Native Guard in April shortly after the Pulitzer announcement and was impressed by Trethewey's diction and command of formal verse forms.  They give her work the clarity and restraint necessary to handle difficult personal memories and sweeping historical narratives with equal mastery.   

You can listen to the interview and hear Trethewey reading several of her poems by clicking on the following link: NPR : Poet Natasha Trethewey, Hymning the Native Guard