С����Ƶ

Warmth, eloquence and empathy.��

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey exuded all three as she navigated difficult subjects last Thursday with students, faculty and others at the University of Tampa.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner delivered an address as this year’s Honors Program distinguished speaker at the Charlene A. Gordon Theater. Trethewey read from her five collections of poetry, mostly about the wounds racism inflicts.

Trethewey served as the 19th��poet laureate of the United States from 2012-2014. The position is both an honor and a charge to oversee poetry readings and symposia at the Library of Congress and promote poetry into the national consciousness.��

Jessie Wahlers ’25, a marine science and biology major, said she walked in not knowing what to expect, but by the time she left, she hoped everyone was paying attention.��

Trethewey, who grew up in the 1960s and 70s in Mississippi, combines personal and national history in her work. In her poem “Incident,” white Klansmen burn a cross in her family’s yard next to a church bus parked in the driveway. She told the students that she still doesn’t know if the hate crime was because of her parents’ illegal interracial marriage, or if was meant for the neighboring church’s voter registration drive.��

“(These) are whole life experiences that a lot of people don't even realize are happening. But you got to know that these issues are going on still so that we can do something about it,” Wahlers said.��

Earlier on Thursday, Trethewey met with about a dozen Honors students, answering questions about her life, her writing and inspirations.��

Joshua Donophan ’27, a history and music major, appreciated Trethewey not “sugarcoating” her message.

“To speak on and condemn history will help prevent us from the doom of repeating it,” he said.����“Slavery was a disease that this nation was infected with for centuries; hate is its offspring. Both of these still exist today in this world, so it’s good she spoke on her lived experiences.”��

Anna Popham ’28, an art therapy major, asked Trethewey about her grandmother, who was a quilter, and her influence on Trethewey’s own artistic endeavors.

The question brought tears to Trethewey’s eyes as she talked about the importance of preserving history through storytelling.��

“When you’re trying to save something from oblivion, it’s important to say it — and say it again,” she told the students.

“It felt like she truly, deeply considered, processed and wanted to not only give an answer that advocated for her work and what she was trying to do, but also satisfy us as readers and answer and attend to our personal experiences,” Popham said.��

Later that night, more that 200 people attended the reading, filling the Gordon Theater.��

Trethewey concluded by talking about “Ground Truth,” a meditative poem about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in the historically Black district of Greenwood, informally known as “Black Wall Street.”

“What I'm trying to say,” she said, “is that to understand America, I spent the day in Tulsa thinking about democracy, standing on Greenwood, sifting through the archives and watching from a distance the slow unearthing of history settled down in the soil.”

“Exhumation of the long-buried in a mass grave at Oak Lawn, evidence of the nearly erased rising now to the surface like a reckoning, a toehold on the truth.”