Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, Professor Trethewey, receives Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “Memorial Drive”

Natasha Trethewey, Weinberg Board of Trustees Professor of English and renowned poet, received the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her nonfiction work Memorial Drive.

Trethewey has previously been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress, and other accolades.

Her most recently prized work, Memorial Drive, is a deeply personal work that investigates her mother’s life and death. It examines the racial prejudices of the United States that Trethewey and her mother experienced. The book also details how Trethewey’s mother inspired her to become a writer through perseverance and strength. After its release, Memorial Drive became a New York Times bestseller.

“Whenever I was written about, my backstory became part of the story,” said Professor Natasha Trethewey in an interview in the New Yorker. “When my backstory was written, my mother entered it only as a footnote, or an afterthought – as simply a ‘victim’ or ‘murdered woman.’ It really hurt me because her role in my life, in me becoming a writer, was being diminished or erased. I just decided that if she was going to get mentioned then I was going to be the one to tell her story, and to put the important role she played in my making in its proper context.”

Trethewey discusses the life story that led to her memoir, “Memorial Drive,” and the role of poetry in the nation’s reckoning in a Northwestern Now interview.

In the video below, Trethewey and other winners of the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were presented by a five-person jury: Jury chair Henry Louis Gates Jr, poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, historian Simon Schama, and psychologist Steven Pinker.