Previously Professor Trethewey spent 15 years at Emory University, most recently as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing. She served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014) and is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall. In 2010 she published a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.

Professor Trethewey is the 2018-2019 Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar.