Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey headlines fall Landiss event
Kim Chaudoin |
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey opens the 2009-10 Lipscomb University Landiss Lecture Series Nov. 3.
The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Doris Swang Chapel, located in the Ezell Center on the Lipscomb University campus. A book signing and reception follows the lecture. Admission is free.
Trethewey, who received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her most recent collection of poems, Native Guard, is known for giving a voice to those who have not been memorialized. In Native Guard, Trethewey fights “historical erasure” by remembering former slaves fighting on the Mississippi coast during the Civil War and memorializes her mother who battled discrimination and domestic violence. Among Trethewey’s other works are Bellocq’s Ophelia, which received a Notable Book Award by the American Library Association, and Domestic Work.
Trethewey is professor of English and holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. She has also been on the faculty at Auburn University, the University of South Carolina and Duke University.
Since the Lipscomb University’s Landiss Lecture Series began in 1985, such notable speakers as Bret Lott, George Garrett, Terry Kay, John Egerton, Wilma Dykeman, Robert Massie, Richard Marius, Jay Parini, and Robert Morgan have engaged the Middle Tennessee community in conversations that challenge the mind. The series was founded Dr. Morris P. Landiss, longtime chair of the Lipscomb English Department, in hope of “challenging the minds of students and those in the community.”
For more information call 615-966-5837.