Natasha D. Trethewey

"At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

"Layering joy and urgent defiance--against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone--Natasha Trethewey's work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, her first retrospective volume, draws together verses that delineate the stories of working-class African American women, a mixed-race prostitute, one of the first black Civil War regiments, mestizo and mulatto figures in casta paintings,...

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces-across time and space-that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and...

"More than 30 acclaimed writers--including diverse voices such as Nikki Giovanni, David Omotosho Black, Natasha Trethewey, Barry Jenkins, Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, and Angela Flournoy--reflect on their experience and expertise in this unique book on the craft of writing that focuses on the Black creative spirit. How We Do It is an anthology curated by Black writers for the creation and proliferation of Black thought. While a creator's ethnicity...