Emory University Scholar Wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Natasha Trethewey, associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Professor Trethewey was honored for her collection of poems entitled Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The poems in the collection reflect on her experiences growing up as a biracial child in Mississippi.

Professor Trethewey is a graduate of the University of Georgia. She holds master’s degrees from Hollins University and the University of Massachusetts.

Three other scholars, all white, also won Pulitzers for books dealing with issues of race. Debby Applegate, a summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher was a Brooklyn preacher who was an abolitionist leader.

University of Maryland professor of journalism Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, the managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, won the Pulitzer Prize for history for their book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.