Natasha Trethewey, a graduate of Hollins University’s master of arts program in English and creative writing, has been awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent collection of poetry, Native Guard.

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, studied at Hollins in 1990 and 1991 and is now an associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. Native Guard, published last year by Houghton Mifflin, blends Trethewey’s reflections on growing up as the daughter of an interracial couple in the Deep South with largely-forgotten Southern history dating back to the Civil War. The Washington Post’s Book World said in its review, “Though this is her third book, Trethewey…may have only scratched the surface of her remarkable talent.”

Trethewey’s previous honors include the inaugural Cave Canem poetry prize in 1999; a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize; and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her previous collections of poetry include Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002). She has also been published in the American Poetry Review, the Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and other literary journals.

A Q&A interview with Trethewey appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 13, 2007.

Trethewey’s father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet and professor of English at Hollins.