Courtesy of the New Georgia Encyclopedia:
The daughter of a black mother and a white father, Trethewey grew up in a South still segregated by custom, if not by law, and her life astride the color line has inspired her recovery of lost histories, public and private.
Life and Education
Although Trethewey has spent much of her life in Georgia, she maintains deep roots in her native Mississippi, where she was born on April 26, 1966, in her mother's hometown of Gulfport. Her parents, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker, and Eric Trethewey, a poet and Canadian emigrant, met as students at Kentucky State College (later Kentucky State University) in Frankfort and later crossed the state line into Ohio to marry—a situation whose ironies and implications the poet deftly explores in "Miscegenation."
After
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her parents' divorce, six-year-old Trethewey moved with her mother to Atlanta, returning every summer to the Gulf Coast, where she split time between the homes of her mother's family and of her father, who was then living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Here she began to discover the complexities of her essential duality—when she was with her father she could pass for white and be treated more equally than when she was among her mother's people. Trethewey also began to write during these years, at her father's urging.
Trethewey's young adulthood was ruptured by violence and tragedy. In 1984 her mother divorced her second husband, Joel Grimmette; a year later, Grimmette shot his ex-wife to death. Nineteen-year-old Trethewey, who was finishing her freshman year at the University of Georgia (UGA) inAthens, where she was an English major and a varsity cheerleader, turned to writing poetry to deal with her grief.
Trethewey completed her B.A. degree at UGA in 1989, and in 1991 she earned an M.A. degree in English and creative writing at Hollins College (later Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied with her father, a professor there. By the time she earned her M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995, Trethewey was starting to publish, and her work has since appeared in the country's most prestigious literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry in both 2000 and 2003.
Trethewey took her first teaching job as an assistant professor of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, in 1997. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Emory University, where she is a professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2005-6 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. Trethewey was the fourth African American poet, and UGA's first graduate outside of journalism, to win a Pulitzer Prize. In early 2008 she received the Mississippi Governor's Award for literary excellence, and in 2011 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Trethewey lives in Decatur with her husband, Brett Gadsden, a historian and assistant professor of African American studies at Emory.
