Alabama Booksmith

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University, her first poetry collection, Domestic Work, won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000, and journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others.

She has a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2000-2001 Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her poem "Storyville Diary" won the Grolier Poetry Prize, a prestigious annual award from the Grolier Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Margaret Walker Award for Poetry from Poets & Writers magazine and QBR: The Black Book Review. She is also the recipient of the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Memorial Award for poetry from American Poetry Review, the Julia Peterkin Award from Converse College, and the Distinguished Young Alumna Award from the University of Massachusetts.