Alison Hedge Coke
Reynolds Endowed Chair, 308.865.8672
UNK– Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey will present her literary work at the University of Nebraska at Kearney on Thursday, Nov. 18.
Trethewey will speak at 8 p.m. in the Fine Arts Recital Hall, located in the UNK Fine Arts Building. Trethewey’s presentation is part of the Reynolds Series, and is free and open to the public.
Trethewey’s most recent work, “Beyond Katrina,” was published in 2010. In 2007, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems “Native Guard,” a history of racial Mississippi and her own multiracial background. Her other poetry collections include “Domestic Work,” which won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry; and “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” which received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was named 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association.
She has received 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. She is the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts of Poetry and was also named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year. Trethewey will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in spring 2011.
Trethewey has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill and Duke University where she was the 2005-2006 Lehman Brady joint chair professor of documentary and American studies. Trethewey is the closing reader for the 2010 Reynolds Series.
A reception and autograph session will take place after the performance, and books and CDs will be available for purchase. All Reynolds Series readings are free and open to the public.
