Professor Natasha Trethewey elected to the American Philosophical Society

Natasha Trethewey, Weinberg Board of Trustees Professor of English and renowned poet has been elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in recognition of extraordinary accomplishments in her field.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the author of five collections of poems, including “Native Guard,” for which she received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and her most recent retrospective, “Monument: Poems New and Selected” (2018), winner of the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress.

Of her work, 13th Librarian of Congress James H. Billington wrote: “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history — personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago — to explore the human struggles that we all face.” Trethewey’s memoir, “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir” became an instant New York Times bestseller upon release in 2020, and she is also the author of a book of nonfiction, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010). Her work has been translated into several languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Polish and Chinese.

Trethewey was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. Her recent honors include the 2017 Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities and the 2022 Harold Washington Literary Award. In 2016 she was awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. In the judge’s citation, Marilyn Nelson wrote: “The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.”

Trethewey is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others, and is currently serving as the William B. Hart Poet-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome.