Sept. 2, 2014

Former U.S. poet laureate to give reading at VCU

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By Brian McNeill

Natasha Trethewey, the immediate past poet laureate of the United States and winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, will visit Virginia Commonwealth University to give a reading and engage in a conversation with Claudia Emerson, a VCU professor and winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The event will be held Sept. 17 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the Commonwealth Ballrooms of VCU Student Commons, 907 Floyd Ave. The event will be free and open to the public.

Trethewey was named the 19th poet laureate of the U.S. in 2012 and served until June 2014. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing and director of the creative writing program at Emory University.

Trethewey is the author of four poetry collections — "Domestic Work" (Graywolf Press, 2000); "Bellocq's Ophelia" (Graywolf, 2002); "Native Guard" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; and "Thrall" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August 2012) — as well as a chapbook, "Congregation" (William Meredith Foundation/Dryad Press, 2014), and a creative nonfiction work, "Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Emerson is a professor of creative writing in VCU's Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences. She is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including "Late Wife" (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), for which she won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Additionally, Emerson has received numerous awards for her poetry, and she served as Virginia's poet laureate from 2008 to 2010.

The event is sponsored by VCU's Humanities Research Center, VCU Libraries and the VCU Office of the President.

Richard Godbeer, director of the Humanities Research Center, said he is "delighted that the center's inaugural event will celebrate the work of this enormously talented Southern poet and in general the power of poetry to sustain and transform our lives. Trethewey's poetry has engaged movingly with recent events such as Hurricane Katrina as well as more distant and yet still resonant tragedies such as the American Civil War, events both personal and communal in their impact."