Hollins Graduate Trethewey Named Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey

Hollins University MFA graduate Natasha Trethewey will be named the United States' poet laureate today. Trethewey has already won the Pulitzer Prize, one of several Hollins graduates to earn that distinction. The 46-year-old poet is a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta and is a native of Gulfport, Miss.

She is the first Southerner since Robert Penn Warren to hold the position and the first African American to be so-named since Rita Dove was designated in 1993.

According to the New York Times, "Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of America. Her fourth collection, Thrall, is scheduled to appear in the fall. She is also the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast."