First published 2025
Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey returns to the shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi where she first learned to read and write. The house sits at the intersection of Highway 49 and Jefferson Street, where the legendary Blues highway crosses through a neighborhood built on land once farmed by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Trethewey explores how this geography shaped her identity as a writer and as the daughter of a Black mother and white father in the South. She recalls the Confederate flags that flew throughout Mississippi, her grandmother's collages that lined the hallway showing glimpses of possibility, and the cultural markers that defined her childhood horizons. Through this intimate examination of place and memory, Trethewey traces how her writing life emerged from the necessity to create new metaphors and claim her own story rather than let others determine it for her.
Genres: family-life, american, african-american, autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century, cultural
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, found-family, personal-journey
Setting: Gulfport, Mississippi, South
Period: Civil War, Confederate Era
96 pages · Paperback · Yale University Press