Prize Ceremony and Lecture by Natasha Trethewey

Festival 2022

Prize Ceremony and Lecture by Natasha Trethewey

  • Monday, September 19
  • 5:00 PM
  • Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall
  • 1111 Chapel Street (enter at 201 York Street)
  • MAP
  • FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Yale University President Peter Salovey presents the 2022 awards in drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and former United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write.”

Trethewey will be introduced by Meghan O'Rourke, editor of The Yale Review.

The lecture will also be livestreamed on the Windham-Campbell YouTube channel.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

All audience members must be vaccinated and boosted and should be prepared to show proof of vaccination. Masks will be required at most indoor events.