Guest Editorial Headnote

In an appearance made possible by the generosity of the South Central Review, U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, held a capacity crowd rapt as she delivered the 70^th Anniversary Keynote Address at the SC-MLA 2013 meeting in New Orleans on October 4, 2013. Trethewey’s address brought home the intimate nature of a poet’s inspiration and the ways in which the work transcends the personal to connect the poetry to its readers or audience. As Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and State Poet Laureate of Mississipi (2012–2016), Trethewey shares her gift well beyond even her two consecutive terms as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The numerous and prestigious awards she has garnered for her work testify to its significance. Her poetry collections include Thrall (Houghton Mifflin 2012), the Pulitzer Prize winning Native Guard (2007), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press 2002), named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association, and Domestic Work (Graywolf Press 2000). She is also the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississipi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010), in which she reflects on the devastation to family, friends, neighbors, and her own sense of place after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast in August of 2005. This latest reflection in prose and verse touched SCMLA participants most keenly as Tropical Storm Karen threatened New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at that very moment.

Natasha Trethewey’s essay offers insights into the diverse influences that played a part in her own revelations about herself as a person and as a writer.¹ She shares the images, the people, and the place that led her to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of her life and work. She recalls the “atrocities and overt injustices” of the world at large and of the immediate world around her in the Deep South of the late sixties and early seventies in which she discovered that the “history of the place from which I’d come, intimate and personal as well as public and collective, was evidence to me of Heraclitus’ axiom: Geography is Fate.” Her many literary influences included George Orwell and his own essay, “Why I Write.” In Trethewey’s “Why I Write,” she reveals how she navigated through Orwell’s and others’ claims about a writer’s motivations and purpose as her own developed. Trethewey asserts that “between historical impulse and political purpose . . . is an intersection, a place of overlap wherein I find my dominant motivation—or at least the one that deserves to be followed.” In the essay which follows, Trethewey relates her own insights into the impulses, the motivations, and the influences which have given purpose to her writing and which have made her one of the most formidable and necessary voices of the twenty-first century.