Pulitzer Prize Winner and United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey Visits UMass Amherst for 2019 Troy Lecture

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Amherst, MASS. –  Acclaimed poet, Pulitzer Prize winner, Guggenheim Fellow and 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-14) Natasha Trethewey will deliver a talk titled “‘You Are Not Safe in Science; You Are Not Safe in History’: On Abiding Metaphors and Finding a Calling” on Thursday, Oct. 3. The talk, this year’s Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life, will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Bowker Auditorium, Stockbridge Hall and is free and open to the public.

Trethewey, 1995 alumna of the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers is the author of “Monument,” which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award.

She is also the author of “Thrall,” which the Washington Post called “a powerful, beautifully crafted book”; “Native Guard,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize; “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association. “Domestic Work” was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American. She served as editor of “The Best American Poetry 2017.”

Among her many honors, Trethewey is the recipient of a 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, as well as the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In the judge’s citation Marilyn Nelson stated, “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn, and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.”

Natasha Trethewey continues the legacy of eminent speakers to visit campus in the Troy Lecture series, the most distinguished series hosted by the English department. The Troy Lecture honors Frederick S. (Barney) Troy, who was a professor of English, an honorary professor of the university, and a university trustee.

Previous Troy lecturers have included Nobel Prize Laureates Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Seamus Heaney and Orhan Pamuk, among other notable figures.