Quotes from Natasha Trethewey

Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.

My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.

Isolated and unincorporated, North Gulfport lacked a basic infrastructure: flooding and contaminated drinking water were frequent problems. Although finally incorporated in 1994 - not long after the arrival of the first casino - many of North Gulfport's streets still lack curbs, sidewalks, and gutters.

I overheard things in the Woolworths when I was a child, people saying, 'Oh, poor, little thing,' as if they had some understanding that I was being born biracial into a world that was still very difficult for interracial marriages and biracial children.

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.

My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.

I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.

the wages of empire is myopia

Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress.

The way you got sideswiped was by going back. —JOAN DIDION

Here is the threshold I do not cross: a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo, the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.

He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood

In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.