On Tuesday, September 25, the 25th anniversary celebration of the Robert W. Woodruff Library (RWWL) of the Atlanta University Center continues with: “An Evening of Spoken Word and Poetry,” featuring Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The event, to be held from 6:30-8 p.m. in the Virginia Lacy Jones Exhibition Hall on the Library’s Upper Level, will feature Atlanta University Center (AUC) student poets, followed by a reading, question-and-answer session and booksigning by the author. The program is free and open to students, faculty and staff of the AUC community.

A native of Gulfport, Miss., Trethewey currently serves as the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. Native Guard, her third published work, was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Poems within the collection honor Trethewey’s mother and recall childhood challenges associated with her parents’ interracial marriage, still illegal when they married in 1966 Mississippi.

Her first book, Domestic Work, was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize presented 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. In addition, the American Library Association named her second work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, a Notable Book for 2003.

Trethewey has been awarded prestigious study fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University and a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Massachusetts.

Promoting student and faculty collaboration in the arts, “An Evening of Spoken Word and Poetry” is one in a series of Library-sponsored events commemorating RWWL’s 25th year of providing collaborative library services to the AUC. For more information on the program, contact Adrian Carver, RWWL Communications Manager, at: acarver@auctr.edu or 404-978-9114.

About the Library
Constructed in 1982, the Robert W. Woodruff Library is an
independent entity organized and operated for the exclusive benefit
of its member institutions—Clark Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College and Spelman College. These colleges and universities represent the
world’s largest consortium of historically black institutions of higher learning. The Library serves a combined student body of more than 10,000.