The Library of Congress announced that Natasha Trethewey would become the 19th United States Poet Laureate. Trethewey, 46, is one of the youngest poets to have received the honor, and also the first southern poet since Robert Penn Warren, the inaugural laureate in 1986. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for third book of poems, Native Guard, which deals with unrecorded Civil War History, centered on a black Civil War regiment stationed off of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. While her work digs deeply into history, culture, and human tragedies, she also writes about her own tragic personal history: the murder of her mother by her stepfather, which occurred while she was a college freshman.

“I started writing poems as a response to that great loss, much the way that people responded, for example, after 9/11,” said Trethewey to The Associated Press. “People who never had written poems or turned much to poetry turned to it at that moment because it seems like the only thing that can speak the unspeakable.”

Currently an English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, she will be the first poet laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she moves there in January of next year, and will work in the Library of Congress’s Poetry Room.

Later this year, her new collection of poems, Thrall, will be published. In this book, Trethewey, who grew up in a mixed household in Mississippi, explores themes of miscegenation, and her relationship with her white father, coupled with ekphrastic poems on paintings and the history of knowledge from the Enlightenment.

Trethewey serves as Southeast Representative on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Source: The Associated Press at Boston.com.