UMass Amherst Alumni Association

How we remember

“No one wants to be forgotten,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey ’95 MFA of her recently published historical memoir, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf. After absorbing the full impact of the category 5 hurricane, the world’s focus quickly shifted from the massive loss and destruction on the Mississippi Gulf to the man-made disaster created by the levee breaks in New Orleans. 

A native of Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey describes life on the coast in Beyond Katrina, and explores the devastation on both the region and her family as a result of the natural disaster. “What we remember, how we remember, and how we understand our past,” notes Trethewey, “has a great meaning for our future.”

This theme runs through much of Trethewey’s work, as she recalls people, places, and events commonly overlooked by history and time. In her collection of poems Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2007, Trethewey writes of the first black regiment to serve the Union during the Civil War. Amidst the many war memorials in Gulfport, none can be found to honor these American patriots. Interwoven with this retrospective of the American South are poems exploring her own personal experience as the child of an interracial marriage in 1960s Mississippi.

In 2002, Trethewey was inspired by the E.J. Bellocq photographs of prostitutes in 1900s New Orleans to write Bellocq’s Ophelia. Through letters and poems, she imagines the life of a young mulatto girl working in a brothel. The work was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association.

Trethewey, a professor of English at Emory University, holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. She was also a James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library in 2010 and has received 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. In 2000, she was awarded the Distinguished Young Alumni award by the UMass Amherst Alumni Association.

As a part of Black History Month celebrations, Trethewey returned to UMass Amherst in February 2011. Her return to Amherst was sponsored by the UMass Amherst Alumni Association; the Malcolm X Cultural Center and the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success; the MFA Program for Poets and Writers, and the English Department.