Search results for ""author natasha trethewey""

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.Through elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—--where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.The title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in Native Guard pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Read more less

'A meditation on race, and class, and grief ... Uplifting, but just wrenching' BARACK OBAMA ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2020 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL IN NON-FICTION 'This will be read for many, many years to come as a classic not just of the memoir genre but of contemporary writing' Simon Schama 'Astonishing' Thandiwe Newton ‘As gripping as any thriller’ Mail on Sunday ‘A masterpiece’ Elizabeth Gilbert ‘Powerful’ The Times At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Heartbreakingly clear-eyed and tender, Memorial Drive is a daughter’s act of love – and an unflinching excavation of the wounds that never heal. For as Trethewey tells her story, and reclaims her mother’s, she lays bare the indelible scars of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation. ‘Sheer artistry ... Trethewey’s masterpiece suggests that the greatest act of defiance a black person can do is to remember’ Financial Times

Read more less

Double Exposure is a major new series based on the remarkable photography collection held by the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Washington, D.C.. From daguerreotype portraits taken before the Civil War, to twenty-first century digital prints, Double Exposure is a striking visual record of key historical events, cultural touchstones, and private and communal moments, that helps to illuminate African American life. Volume 3 of Double Exposure highlights NMAAHC's rich collection of photographs of African American women, some of whom are cultural icons. This volume demonstrates the dignity, joy, heartbreak, commitment, and sacrifice of women of all ages and backgrounds, with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Beverly Conley, Robert Galbraith, Ernest C. Withers, Wayne F. Miller, P.H. Polk, Joe Schwartz, and Milton Williams. Poems by Natasha Trethewey Essay by Kinchasha Homan Conwill AUTHOR: Natasha Trethewey was the United States Poet Laureate 2012?2013, and has written two new poems for this title. Kinshasha Holman Conwill is the deputy director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Read more less