Video: Poet Natasha Trethewey Reads at Cave Canem 2011
by Sampsonia Way / October 11, 2011 / No comments
Natasha Trethewey’s first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. Domestic Work, which bases its poetry on photographs of African-Americans at work in pre-civil rights America, also won the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
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Trethewey has published two other books of poems: Native Guard (2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002).
She is currently Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and is a Cave Canem faculty member.
Her fourth collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2012. In this video, Trethewey reads some selections from the manuscript.
On June 23, Cave Canem, in partnership with City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, presented a free reading on Pittsburgh’s Monterey Street where Natasha Trethewey read, along with Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, and special guest Amiri Baraka.
Read Sampsonia Way‘s interview with Amiri Baraka.