Natasha Trethewey, the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University, has been named one of two new chancellors of the American Academy of Poets. Since it was formed in 1946, only 115 poets have been elected to the academy.
Professor Trethewey is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and four other poetry collections. She is also the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010). Professor Trethewey served two terms as poet laureate of the United States.
In addition to the Academy of American Poets, Professor Trethewey is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2013, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science, and in 2017 she won the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.
A native of Gulfport, Mississippi, Professor Trethewey holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
