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  • Letter to Professor Natasha Trethewey

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Photograph by Joeff Davis © 2012

November 25, 2014

Professor Natasha Trethewey
Professor of English
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia 30322

Dear Lady Natasha:

Once more I want to thank you and your very supportive and attentive staff for hosting and assisting us in mounting and coordinating what many of those who attended have described as “an extraordinary and intellectually stimulating gathering,” the 2014 Callaloo Conference, held October 15–18, at Emory University.

A few days ago, I wrote the following to a New Englander, who attended and later celebrated the conference, that it was “our host, U. S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey—with her cordial words of welcome, her carefully ordered sites for our presentations and sessions, and her mindful and attentive assistants—who also helped to make the conference what it became for all who attended.” The conference was indeed a very positive and invaluable event, and will be long remembered as a veritable cornucopia of free intellectual [End Page 645] and creative exchanges in a locus whose very atmosphere is both pastoral and urbane. Then, too, your greeting attendees, your generous and kind public words about Callaloo and what it has meant in your literary life, your making us feel at home with meals and receptions, and (allow me to be personal here) your housing me in a very comfortable and beautifully appointed suite, and your surprising celebration of my birthday on the final night of the conference—each of these and other wonderful gestures you made added multiple very positive dimensions to the conference. And thank you ever so much, Natasha, for the thoughtful generosity and selfless care that you, in a personal way, extended with exquisite taste to each of us.

I want you to know—and I think that the members of the Callaloo Conference will allow me to speak for them also—that we shall long remember what you did for all of us during our intellectually intense, but all too brief, visit to Emory University last October. Again, thank you ever so much.

What a joy it will be to speak with you—and Brett, Jericho, Kevin, and Sarita—again very soon, for they too contributed immensely to the success of the 2014 Callaloo Conference.

Sincerely,

Charles Henry Rowell
Editor of Callaloo
Professor of English

P. S. One more personal note. A week after the conference Jackson & Binta Brown, and I went to London to coordinate, along with other journal concerns, the 2014 UK Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. While in the UK, we also paid Professor Stephen Tuck a visit at Oxford University, where he hosted the 2013 Callaloo Conference. I thought that this would interest you: he literally celebrated your reading at Oxford, and he regaled us with his very young daughter’s gleeful words of deep appreciation of your elegant and eloquent reading at our UK conference. [End Page 646]

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