This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties asUnited States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created theposition in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to theLibrary of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programsof the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading.With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in thecomplexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born fatherand her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she wasborn, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Courtlegalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when shewas young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with hergrandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19,her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’s words, “I turnedto poetry to make sense of what had happened.”Trethewey’s poetry is unique for the manner in which she fuses historical materialsand vernacular language with traditional verse forms. In Bellocq’s Ophelia, sheimagines the inner life of an anonymous prostitute immortalized by the NewOrleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. In 2007, she received the Pulitzer Prize for herbook Native Guard, a verse narrative inspired by a black regiment of the UnionArmy during the Civil War.