American - Poet | April 26, 1966 -
Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.
Natasha Trethewey
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My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.
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I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.
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One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities.
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Isolated and unincorporated, North Gulfport lacked a basic infrastructure: flooding and contaminated drinking water were frequent problems. Although finally incorporated in 1994 - not long after the arrival of the first casino - many of North Gulfport's streets still lack curbs, sidewalks, and gutters.
WaterProblemsLongDrinking Water
When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.
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I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.
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I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
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In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
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In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
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Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
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I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.
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