{"title":"Books by Natasha Trethewey","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781408840207","title":"Memorial Drive","description":"\u003cp\u003e'A meditation on race, and class, and grief ... Uplifting, but just wrenching' BARACK OBAMA\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2020\u003cbr\u003eAN INSTANT \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBOOK OF THE YEAR\u003cbr\u003eWINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD\u003cbr\u003eSHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL IN NON-FICTION\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'This will be read for many, many years to come as a classic not just of the memoir genre but of contemporary writing' Simon Schama\u003cbr\u003e'Astonishing' Thandiwe Newton\u003cbr\u003e‘As gripping as any thriller’ \u003ci\u003eMail on Sunday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘A masterpiece’ Elizabeth Gilbert\u003cbr\u003e‘Powerful’ \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHeartbreakingly clear-eyed and tender, \u003ci\u003eMemorial Drive\u003c\/i\u003e is a daughter’s act of love – and an unflinching excavation of the wounds that never heal. For as Trethewey tells her story, and reclaims her mother’s, she lays bare the indelible scars of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e‘Sheer artistry ... Trethewey’s masterpiece suggests that the greatest act of defiance a black person can do is to remember’ \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204286447794,"sku":"9781408840207","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781408840207_9c150f33-19bb-4fbe-8cd3-096826ddda46.jpg?v=1786019864"},{"product_id":"9780618872657","title":"Native Guard","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWinner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFormer U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey’s \u003cem\u003eNative Guard\u003c\/em\u003e is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThrough elegaic verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—--where one of the first black regiments, The Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title of the collection refers to the black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey’s life on a much more immediate level, too. Many of the poems in \u003cem\u003eNative Guard\u003c\/em\u003e pay loving tribute to her mother, whose marriage to a white man was illegal in her native Mississippi in the 1960s. Years after her mother’s tragic death, Trethewey reclaims her memory, just as she reclaims the voices of the black soldiers whose service has been all but forgotten.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56293930467701,"sku":"9780618872657","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780618872657_bf895888-f9c2-4112-a6c2-bf7623d861f6.jpg?v=1786014980"},{"product_id":"9780300281798","title":"The House of Being","description":"An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey   “Trethewey doesn’t just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories.”—Shannon Carlin, Time  “Searching and intimate, this impresses.”—Publishers Weekly   In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.      In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419553542517,"sku":"9780300281798","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300281798_494071b3-fb37-47e0-8f8b-2249b39771d8.jpg?v=1786012150"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-natasha-trethewey.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}