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At Smartish Pace, you can read about the interviews we conducted with acclaimed authors. Learn more by checking out our website today.

Natasha Trethewey, (born April 26, 1966, Gulfport, Mississippi, U.S.), American poet and teacher who served as poet laureate consultant in poetry (2012–14). Her subjects were chiefly history (both her family’s and that of the American South), race, and memory. Trethewey was born in the Deep South to an African American mother and a white father on the centennial of Confederate Memorial Day. Interracial marriage was still against the law in Mississippi when she was born. Her mother, a social worker, and her father, a Canadian poet and teacher, divorced when she was six. Her mother married ...

Interviews An Interview With Natasha Trethewey Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the author of Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) and Native Guard (2006), the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book is Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississipi Gulf Coast (2010). Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment...

Talking with Poet Hannah VanderHart about Her Illuminating Debut Collection, ‘What Pecan Light’ It would be wrong to call Hannah VanderHart’s poems masterful, though at times it is tempting to, anyway. In “When Someone Says a Poem Is Masterful,” a poem near the end of her first full-length collection, What Pecan Light, the speaker asks, “who wants to master the body of a poem? (no one should).” A beat later, an admission: “I have a master in my family tree / Jack Allums / he will always be there.” These are poems that meet the white reader on a co...