Emory Professor is U.S. Poet Laureate

An Emory University writing professor was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate today. The Library of Congress bestowed the honor on Natasha Trethewey, a Mississippi native and Pulitzer Prize winner. After winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems “Native Guard,” about a black Civil War regiment, Trethewey explained to WABE how she gets inspired to write.

“Certainly, inspiration comes,” she says, “And I think of that as sort of ‘gifts from the muses,’ when they arrive unbidden like that. But in order to get them to come, I read other people’s poems.”

When Trethewey was a freshman in college, her mother was killed by her ex-husband. She said she wrote poems to deal with the pain.