Poet Natasha Trethewey to Visit Eastern

Written by Kate Harner

Willimantic, CT -- Award-winning poet Natasha Trethewey will hold a poetry reading at Eastern Connecticut State University at 7:30 p.m. on April 14 in Room 104 of the Science Building. The event is being sponsored by Eastern's English Club. The public is invited. Admission is free.

Trethewey's first book of poetry, "Domestic Work," won the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American; the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize; and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her collection of poems, "Native Guard," received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has also published "Bellocq's Ophelia," which received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. On April 15, Ms. Trethewey will also hold a question and answer session at 11 a.m. in Room 301 of the Science Building. That event is also free and open to the public.

Trethewey has received fellowships from the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Trethewey is now a professor of English at Emory University, where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

For more information, contact Miranda Lau at (860) 465-4570 or laum@easternct.edu.