UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will offer a reading at Penn State’s University Park campus as this year’s Emily Dickinson Lecturer. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, in Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center.

Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012 to 2014). In his citation, Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote, “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history — personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago — to explore the human struggles that we all face.”

Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry: “Monument” (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; “Thrall” (2012); “Native Guard” (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002); and “Domestic Work” (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She also is the author of the memoir “Memorial Drive” (2020) and the nonfiction book “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010).

Other accolades for Trethewey include the 2020 Bobbitt Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2017 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category, and the 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In the citation, fellow poet and judge Marilyn Nelson stated, “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities. Whether writing of her complex family torn by tragic loss, or in diverse imagined voices from the more distant past, Trethewey encourages us to reflect, learn and experience delight. The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary.”

Trethewey also has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and served as State Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2012 to 2016. She is currently a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

Trethewey’s signature project during her second term as poet laureate was a PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, “Where Poetry Lives.” In this series, Trethewey traveled with Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown to cities across the United States to explore societal issues such as Alzheimer’s disease, domestic abuse, the civil rights movement, and incarcerated teenagers — all through the prism of poetry, literature and Trethewey’s own personal experiences.

The Emily Dickinson Lectureship in American Poetry is made possible through the generosity of Penn State alumni George and Barbara Kelly. Additional support for the event comes from the Penn State Department of English.