Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed the nineteenth United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard. She is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, and Thrall. She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.