Pulitzer Prize-winnner Trethewey shares poetry at Landiss event

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey entranced a large crowd at the 2009 fall Landiss Lecture Series Tuesday evening with her personal poems of growing up in the South.

 

Trethewey described the process she went through to write Native Guard, the poetry collection that received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Native Guard became a combination of re-imagined history of a black regiment in the Civil War, stationed in her hometown, Gulfport, Miss., and an elegy to her mother, who had died some 20 years before.

 

Trethewey, who grew up as the child of an inter-racial marriage in 1960s Mississippi, said she is fascinated with exploring how national history intersects with personal history, how collective memory intersects with individual memory.

 

Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory 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.”