Description:

This event is presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Natasha Trethewey is a tour de force of poetry. She is also a Pulitzer Prize winner, U.S. poet laureate, and best-selling author, not to mention an Evanston resident and a professor of English at Northwestern. Join us as she discusses her newest book, The House of Being. Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased. She revisits the geography of her childhood, tracing the origins of her writing life in an intimate and searching meditation of her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi.

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. But years prior, this same land was a farming settlement where a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home. She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be.