Natasha Trethewey, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, read poems from two of her collections, Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard, and explained the history of her poems. She discussed the research that she does to compose her poems and using the dictionary to explore meanings of words. Her advice to burgeoning poets was to “fall in love with sentences.”
Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her first poetry collection, *Domestic Work* (2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, *Bellocq's Ophelia *(2002), received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in several volumes of* Best American Poetry*, and in journals such as *Agni*, *American Poetry Review*, *Callaloo*, *Gettysburg Review*, *Kenyon Review*, *New England Review*, and *The Southern Review*, among others. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.