PBS.org: 'Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey will be the 19th Poet Laureate'

[Natasha Trethewey]

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PBS.org
PBS NewsHour
Natasha Trethewey Named U.S. Poet Laureate
Posted by Mike Melia, June 7, 2012

Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey will be the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, the Library of Congress announced on Thursday.

"Natasha Trethewey is an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry," Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a statement. "Her 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."

Born in Gulfport, Miss., in 1966, Trethewey's work has chronicled the complicated history of her own family and that of the South. As the daughter of a black mother and white father, an interracial union that was still illegal in Mississippi at the time, "it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents," she told the NewsHour in 2006.