Poet Laureate

This is my gift to those folks who stopped by my blog today.

Loved this article about Natasha Trethewey in the New York Times.  Such an interesting writer! When she saw the Library of Congress number on her called ID, she thought it might be a prank.

Yesterday I caught up with a lot of radio interviews, including the news she'd just been named Poet Laureate.
(I really enjoy road trips if I can listen to nonstop NPR.)

I'd missed this one from the time she won the Pulitzer. Her prize-winning poetry collection includes sonnets about the Native Guard, a black Civil War regiment assigned to guard white Confederate soldiers held on Ship Island off the Gulf Coast.

HERE'S a new interview I've just downloaded.

CLICK HERE to go to the earlier Fresh Air interview.

And this, from the NPR website, by way of introduction:

Trethewey is the first poet laureate to hail from the South since Robert Penn Warren was appointed in 1986. The 46-year-old Mississippi native grew up the child of a racially mixed marriage in Gulfport, Miss. Her mother was later murdered by her estranged second husband, Trethewey's stepfather; these, along with the South and its singular ways, are recurring themes in her poetry.



Another gift: a few of her poems, also from the New York Times:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/selected-poems-by-natasha-trethewey.html