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Poet Laureate speaks today at UGA

Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey speaks today at UGA: she is in the University of Georgia Chapel on UGA’s North Campus at 4 o’clock this afternoon.

From the UGA master calendar…

The Willson Center will welcome Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey to the University of Georgia as the 2021-2022 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding. Trethewey, who is Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, will visit UGA and Athens April 21-22 for a slate of public events and informal conversations with college and high school students. The program is presented in partnership with the Institute for African American Studies, the department of English, and the Creative Writing Program.

A reading in the UGA Chapel at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 21, will be followed by a public reception on the lawn outside the Chapel. On Friday, April 22, at 6 p.m., Trethewey will take part in a public conversation with professors Barbara McCaskill and John Lowe of the department of English at the historic Morton Theatre in downtown Athens. Books will be offered for sale at the event by Avid Bookshop. During her two-day visit, Trethewey will also meet with students in classes at both UGA and Clarke Central High School.

The Chapel event will be free, general admission and open to the public. The Morton Theatre event will be free and open to the public, but ticket reservations must be made online through the Morton Theatre box office. Face coverings are encouraged based on preference and assessment of personal risk.

Requests for accommodations for those with disabilities should be made as soon as possible but at least 7 days prior to the scheduled event. Please contact Dave Marr at davemarr@uga.edu to request accommodations.

Trethewey has published five books of poetry including Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, and Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She is also the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) and Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020), a New York Times bestseller. She was named the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2012 and selected for a second term a year later. Her many honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and election to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. The Library of Congress awarded her the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry in 2020.

Trethewey has roots in Georgia and at UGA, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree in English before moving on to Hollins College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for her Master’s and M.F.A., respectively. She spent part of her childhood in Atlanta and taught for a time at Emory University. The University of Georgia Libraries inducted Trethewey into the Georgia Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2011.

The Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding, established by the Willson Center through the support of The Delta Air Lines Foundation, hosts outstanding global scholars, leading creative thinkers, artists, and intellectuals who engage with audiences on and off the UGA campus through lectures, seminars, discussions, and other community events. The Delta Chair program aims to foster conversations that engage with global perspectives through the humanities and arts. The chair was last held by Michael Ondaatje, the award-winning author of The English Patient, in October 2019.

Tim Bryant

Tim Bryant

Tim Bryant hosts Classic City Today, 6-10 weekday mornings on 98.7FM & AM 1340 WGAU in Athens.

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