Natasha Trethewey, a graduate of Hollins University’s master of arts program in English and creative writing, will be Hollins' Louis D. Rubin Writer-in-Residence for 2012. She was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent collection of poetry, Native Guard. In January 2012 she was named poet laureate of Mississippi.

Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, studied at Hollins in 1990 and 1991. She is professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University in Atlanta. Native Guard, published last year by Houghton Mifflin, blends Trethewey’s reflections on growing up as the daughter of an interracial couple in the Deep South with largely-forgotten Southern history dating back to the Civil War. The Washington Post’s Book World said in its review, "Though this is her third book, Trethewey…may have only scratched the surface of her remarkable talent."

Trethewey’s previous honors include the inaugural Cave Canem poetry prize in 1999; a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize; and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her previous collections of poetry include Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002). She has also been published in the American Poetry Review, the Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and other literary journals.

Trethewey’s father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet and professor of English at Hollins.