Northwestern Now ‘For My People’ was written by Northwestern alumna Margaret Walker Alexander On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Northwestern English professor Natasha Trethewey, two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007, introduced a special collaborative remix of the seminal poem “For My People,” a civil rights anthem written in 1937 by Northwestern alumna Margaret Walker Alexander. A collaboration between PBS American Portrait and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Arts, of which Trethewey is co-chair, the project invited Americans to submit their own lines inspired by “For My People.” The Academy enlisted members — including John Lithgow, Yo-Yo Ma, Ken Burns and Henry Louis Gates — to record parts of the poem.