Beyond Katrina

by Trethewey, Natasha

• ISBN13: 9780820333816
• ISBN10: 0820333816
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-01
• Publisher: UNIV OF GEORGIA PR

Summary

Beyond Katrinais poet Natasha Tretheweyrs"s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her motherrs"s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warrenrs"s bookSegregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of theBrowndecision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens-particularly African Americans-were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brotherrs"s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Tretheweyrs"s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in theVirginia Quarterly Review. ForBeyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

Author Biography

Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University.