August Wilson: Trethewey

In this debut collection, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labour-filled day reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, and the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.

In the early 1900s, E.J. Bellocq photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans. His remarkable, candid photos inspired Natasha Trethewey to imagine the life of Ophelia, the subject of her stunning second collection.

Trethewey's new book of poems pays homage to the Black soldiers who served in the Civil War and whose voices have echoed through her own life. The racial legacy of the Civil War echoes through elegiac poems that honor her own mother and the forgotten history of her native South. Native Guard is haunted by the intersection of national and personal experience.

The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard, by America's new Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historical--exploring her own interracial and complicated roots--and utterly American, connecting them to ours.

Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey's very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.

The interviews featured within Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work.

Congregation is ... a "love letter to the Gulf Coast, a praise song, a dirge, invocation and benediction, a requiem for the Gulf coast." Here are the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Katrina, speaking to her with the folk wisdom, and faith, of the survivor.

Edited by Pulitzer Prize-winner and nineteenth US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The Best American Poetry 2017 brings together the most notable poems of the year in the series that offers "a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable" (Robert Pinsky).

"[Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human struggles that we all face."--James H. Billington, 13th Librarian of Congress   Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons.