Special to The T&D

The English Department at Claflin University will host a reading and book signing during a reception for Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 23, in Minister's Hall. The reading is free and open to the public.

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Miss., won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her most recent collection titled "Native Guard" (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Her first poetry collection, "Domestic Work" (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, "Bellocq's Ophelia," received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Tretheway's work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2003 and 2000 and in journals such as Agni American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review and The Southern Review, among others.

Trethewey has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Georgia, a master's degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University, and an Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. She 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.

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