With Black History Month around the corner, Florida A&M University is hosting its 10th Annual Spring Literary Forum. For the past nine years FAMU’s Department of English and Modern Language, College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and the School of the Environment have hosted the annual literary forum where numerous well-known speakers and authors come to give insight on different aspects of literature. It's a chance for students to hear firsthand from people who are making their mark on history.
Pulitzer Prize winner and 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, Natasha Trethewey, will deliver the keynote speech at the 10th Annual Spring Literary Forum at 6:30 p.m. Friday Feb. 23 in FAMU’s School of the Environment Suite 214.
Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States between the years of 2012-2014. In 2000, Trethewey’s first collection, Domestic Work, won the Cave Canem Prize for a first book written by an African American poet. Her first collection studies the lives and jobs of working class people in the South, particularly black men and women. Her second book, Bellocq’s Ophelia, published in 2002, is about a fictional prostitute in New Orleans in the early 1900s. Her third book of poems, Native Guard published in 2006, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. That book contains elegies to her mother, who died while Trethewey was in college, and a sonnet sequence in the voice of a black soldier fighting in the Civil War. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016 she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and in 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.
Aside form her numerous accomplishments with her profession in poetry, Trethewey is also a university official. Trethewey took her first teaching job as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama, in 1997. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta, where she was a Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2005-2006 she served as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Currently Trethewey works at Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts & Science in the Department of English.
Her appearance at FAMU is free and open to the public. For additional information, call: (850)-599-8697