Best of the National Book Festival: Natasha Trethewey and Jenny Xie, 2019

Welcome to our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival. Each weekday, we will feature a video presentation from among the thousands of authors who have appeared at the National Book Festival and as part of our new year-long series, National Book Festival Presents. Mondays will feature topical nonfiction; Tuesday: poetry or literary fiction; Wednesday: history, biography, memoir; Thursday: popular fiction; and Friday: authors who write for children and teens. Please enjoy, and make sure to explore our full National Book Festival video collection!

The “Poetry of Place” was the theme of a discussion on the Poetry & Prose stage of the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival. Anya Creightney, programs manager in the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, introduced poets Natasha Trethewey and Jenny Xie. Trethewey was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012-14 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Xie is a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, among other honors.

At one point in the conversation, Trethewey talks about the tensions of history and place in her work: “The geography into which I was born — the deep South, Mississippi, on Confederate Memorial Day — is a kind of destiny. When you’re given your history, you inherit the history of the place, of the people there. You are both inside of it and, if you’re lucky, able to step outside of it and look at your place in this particular history.”

The presentation begins with a reading by both poets. Natasha Trethewey reads three poems from “Monument: Poems New and Selected”:

• “Miscegenation” (2:57)
• “Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath” (5:26)
• “Articulation” (8:51)

Jenny Xie reads two poems from “Eye Level”:

• “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season” (11:08)
• “Naturalization” (17:00)

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