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U.S. Poet Laureate Kicks Off Georgia State Centennial Speaker Series on Jan. 16
ATLANTA – Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate, will read excerpts from her newest book, “Thrall: Poems,” at 2 p.m., Jan. 16 as the first speaker in Georgia State University’s Centennial Speaker Series.
The event will be held at the Rialto Center for the Performing Arts, 80 Forsyth St. N.W. It will be followed by a book signing and reception at 3 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
“We welcome Trethewey reading from her work at the beginning of our centennial year, helping Georgia State and our Atlanta communities to recognize, to know and possibly love our stories and histories,” said Pearl McHaney, associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor of English.
Trethewey, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2006 work, “Native Guard,” was named as the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate as “Thrall” was released. It is an intricate weaving of personal and public stories and histories – hidden, erased and forgotten, as well as those celebrated, codified and recorded, McHaney said.
“’Thrall’ concerns the ways in which knowledge and love hold us imprisoned, enslaved, and how colonialist enthrallment beginning in the Enlightenment continues today,” she added.
Trethewey’s first poetry collection, “Domestic Work,” published in 2000 was selected as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for best first book by an African-American poet and won the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Trethewey has also written “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” a nonfiction book.
She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, and is also the poet laureate of Mississippi.
Trethewey has 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 University.
For more about Georgia State University Centennial activities, visit 100.gsu.edu.
December 21, 2012
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