KEYNOTE SPEAKER
This year’s keynote speaker is Natasha Trethewey, an American poet born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Southeastern Museums Conference is excited to have Ms. Trethewey as a speaker in her home state of Mississippi. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi. In 2012, James Billington, then Librarian of Congress, named her the 19th US Poet Laureate. She was the first Southerner to receive the honor since Robert Penn Warren, in 1986, and the first African-American since Rita Dove, in 1993. Billington said, after hearing her poetry at the National Book Festival, that he was “immediately struck by a kind of classic quality with a richness and variety of structures with which she presents her poetry … she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it.”
Among her many honors, Trethewey is the recipient of a 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, as well as the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In the judge’s citation, Marilyn Nelson said: “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.” Trethewey has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of Best American Poetry. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
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