what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what…

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping…

— Natasha Trethewey

My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost.…

— Natasha Trethewey

“the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns”

— Natasha Trethewey

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

— Natasha Trethewey

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow…

— Natasha Trethewey

“Here is the threshold I do not cross: a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo, the anchor on his forearm tangled…

— Natasha Trethewey

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at…

— Natasha Trethewey

My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.

— Natasha Trethewey

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I…

— Natasha Trethewey

I've been telling my students, 'Imitate, imitate.' And they say, 'Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I'm not original? I want to…

— Natasha Trethewey

I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my…

— Natasha Trethewey

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they…

— Natasha Trethewey

Jesmyn Ward left her Gulf Coast home for education and experience, but it called her back. It called on her in most painful ways,…

— Natasha Trethewey

My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the…

— Natasha Trethewey

“I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page…

— Natasha Trethewey