Description
This program is funded in part by the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative, which seeks to focus on journalism and the humanities, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by Pulitzer Prize-winning work. For their generous support for the Campfires Initiative, we thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and Columbia University. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, where she confronts the complex racial legacy of her native South. Tretheway was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of a mixed-race marriage, which was illegal in the Mississippi of that era. Her mother was an African American social worker and her father a white man who hitchhiked to America from Nova Scotia and became a poet and professor. In this interview Tretheway, who in 2012 was named Poet Laureate of Mississippi, reads her poetry from Native Guard and speaks movingly about the black men who served during the Civil War and her own experience of growing up bi-racial in the south.
