Booking and details
Dates Thu, Mar 21, 2024, 7:30pm
Tickets $25
Duration 60 minutes
Please note: Children under the age of 4 are not permitted.
The Folger and the Eudora Welty Foundation join together to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as she receives the 2024 Eudora Welty Prize. Staged at Washington DC’s famed National Press Club, Natasha will present her lecture inspired by the writing and life of famed author Eudora Welty. There will be a book signing after the lecture. We invite you into this intimate moment steeped in literary history.
The lecture is produced by the Eudora Welty Foundation in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library.
About Natasha Trethewey
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir; a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected, which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall; Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia; and Domestic Work, 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.
She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser, Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems From Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2015-2016, she served as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, and in 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2019.
At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
The Eudora Welty Foundation was established to assist the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to achieve its goals of celebrating the legacy of Eudora Welty, enhancing appreciation of her work, and encouraging reading and the efforts of young writers. The Foundation’s broad mission is to fund educational and research activities and to develop programs that will enhance Eudora Welty’s legacy and ensure that her work continues to be recognized as among the greatest in American literature. To visitors from across America and around the world, the WeltyHome provides a literary experience to enhance the understanding of Welty’s life and work. Welty’s fiction affirms that the imagination can be a powerful force to combat suffering, both physical and spiritual. Programming emphasizes Welty’s striking intellect and creative powers, her devotion to the humanities, the place of literature in our lives, and the role of the writer in our society.
Learn more about the Eudora Welty Foundation.
Works by Natasha Trethewey
