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Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet to Give Reading at Washington and Lee

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey will give a reading at Washington and Lee University on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 4:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium of Leyburn Library. She will read from her earlier works and from her forthcoming collection Thrall.

Trethewey’s reading is free and open to the public. A book signing will be held after the reading outside of Northen Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment.

Trethewey is the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010); Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association; and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). Her collection Thrall is due for publication in 2012.

The Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Trethewey is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.

Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work, was selected as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet, and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

W&L’s Glasgow Endowment was established by the late Arthur G. Glasgow for the “promotion of the expression of art through pen and tongue.”  In the past four decades the endowment has hosted authors including Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Linda Hogan and Edward P. Jones.