The Phenomenal Natasha Trethewey Natasha Trethewey was perhaps one of the most influential and most talented minds that the world has ever known and encountered. She is a highly acclaimed writer, who is the daughter of a Canadian poet and professor, as well as, a social worker by the name of Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Her parents were big believers in the importance of having an education and reading. She was encouraged to be and do her very best in every endeavor, despite her living situation. She was a southern girl at heart and in mind. Her father was a strong motivator of hers to become a poet. She saw him work hard on poetry before the separation of her parents at the age …show more content…
For example, in one of her many poems, “Three Photographs,” the reader and/or viewer is compelled to witness for those unable to speak for themselves. “The eyes of eight women/I don’t know/stare out from this photograph/saying remember.” Another example of her writing of her own experiences can be found in her second book and/or masterpiece, “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” which was published in 2002. In this book of poems she describes vividly her take on the images in light of E. J. Bellocq's early twentieth-century photos of prostitutes in the scandalous Storyville District of New Orleans. Composed for the most part as letters or diary entries by the envisioned Ophelia, the ballads/poems portray her as an object caught in the monocle of an examining white male customer, as a subject surrounded in Bellocq's focal point, and as a lady getting a handle on her part in molding her own particular personality. This book became the Champ of the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, Bellocq's Ophelia was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Trethewey's thoughtfulness regarding lost histories discovers full articulation in the Pulitzer Prize– winning Native Guard (2006). The collection's three parts-elegies to the writer's dead mother, a ten-sonnet ballad in the voice of a black soldier battling in the Civil War (1861-65), and a last segment of self-portraying lyrics—rise up out of Trethewey's want to cure recorded amnesias. As a grown-up, Trethewey discovered that the gatekeepers of the Confederate jail at Mississippi's Ship Island were the Louisiana Native Guards, the Union armed force's first official all-dark regiment to serve in the Civil War—a reality never said by visit guides or recorded plaques amid her yearly