Emotional Journeys Through Poetry and Personal Literature Choices

“Being able to be here and to tell this story—to weep about it occasionally—that is uplifting because what the story says is: ‘I'm still here. I have survived it. I have joy in my life because I have known such depths of despair.’ That is uplifting.”

So says Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has authored several books and served two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States. Trethewey and Moore discuss their respective familial connections to the state of Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina, and the Gulf Coast. They talk about Trethewey’s lifelong desire to write, her experience as a mixed-race person, and her thoughts on belonging, grief, and faith. 

Their conversation welcomes all who long for community, creativity, and clarity.

Resources mentioned in this episode or recommended by the guest include:

• Natasha Trethewey
• Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
• Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Natasha Trethewey
• Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey
• Providence by Natasha Trethewey
• “Pulitzer Prize Winner Trethewey Discusses Poetry Collection”
• Elizabeth Sewell
• Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow by Robert Duncan
• “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe
• The House of Being (Why I Write) by Natasha Trethewey
• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
• Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert
• Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey
• Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor
• Seamus Heaney
• Toni Morrison
• The Sea by John Banville

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