Back Draft: Natasha Trethewey
Two-term US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer-Prize Winner Natasha Trethewey has won nearly every major award under the sun. And yet her poems never rest on their laurels, always striving for a sharper examination of the memories our country—particularly the South—might prefer to bury. For Trethewey, racism remains both a national concern and a familial one. In “Repentance,” she details with painterly precision an argument rooted in these historical tensions.
When I spoke with Trethewey over the phone on a frigid November day, she was at a bittersweet moment in her own history. It was the week of the publication of Monument: Poems New and Selected, a powerful testament to her life’s work as a poet. It was also the one-year anniversary of a fire that took a profound toll on her and her family. Before hanging up, Trethewey apologized for rambling. To the contrary, her openness left me awed. There was nothing to forgive.
– Ben Purkert for Guernica
Natasha Trethewey: I hope I chose a good poem for this. Well, actually, I didn’t have much of a choice.
Guernica: What do you mean?
Natasha Trethewey: I lost most of my drafts in a fire.
Guernica: Oh no! What happened?
It was last year on Thanksgiving morning. My husband I had just taken jobs at Northwestern, and we had just moved to Evanston, and were having a library
