Trethewey is named U.S. poet laureate

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Natasha Trethewey began writing poems after a personal tragedy.

While Trethewey was a college freshman, her mother was killed by a stepfather Tretheway had long feared.

“I started writing poems as a response to that great loss, much the way that people responded, for example, after 9/11,” she told The Associated Press. “People who never had written poems or turned much to poetry turned to it at that moment because it seems like the only thing that can speak the unspeakable.”

Trethewey, 46, an English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, was named the 19th U.S. poet laureate Thursday.

The Pulitzer Prize winner is the nation’s first poet laureate to hail from the South since the initial one — Robert Penn Warren — was named by the Library of Congress in 1986.