At Howard University’s 157th Commencement May 10, acclaimed poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be awarded a Doctor of Letters honorary degree — the first honorary degree she has received from an HBCU. 

“My parents met at an HBCU,” she said, speaking in a wide-ranging interview days before Howard’s commencement ceremony. “And it means the world to me particularly because Howard is a place with a commitment to truth and social justice and educating the next generation of leaders who will be in pursuit of truth and social justice.” 

Trethewey describes herself as Black and biracial, born in Mississippi in 1966 — a time she noted when her parents’ interracial marriage was still illegal in the state and in nearly 20 others. Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection “Native Guard.” She is often praised for her ability to confront challenging themes, including the trauma of her mother’s murder. 

She said her mother’s death, when she was just 19, was the turning point that led her to begin writing. “It was an unfathomable loss,” she said. 

 “In the South, we have a phrase about somebody ‘carrying on’ — like, ‘she was over there carrying on.’ We think about that in a lot of different ways,” she said. 

“It’s both the burdens that we carry, but also that carrying on where somebody is signifying and doing just the right thing to say what needs to be said. I take that with me all the time — both in my written work and when I am speaking.”

In the interview, Trethewey said she found inspiration in Howard University literary greats Toni Morrison and Sterling A. Brown. Before becoming an icon, Morrison earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard in 1953 and returned some years later to teach in the English department. While teaching at Howard, Morrison joined a campus writers’ group and shared an early short story that later became her first novel, “The Bluest Eye” (1970). Sterling A. Brown taught at Howard for 40 years and was a key figure in both the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. 

Addressing Morrison, Trethewey said, “I think about Toni Morrison because if she really cared what people thought about her, she would not have written the amazing and difficult things that she did. She would not have told the stories about American history that she had to tell.”

She added, “I am someone who has endured a lot of trauma, and yet I think the writing has saved me in a lot of ways.” 

Trethewey said she also draws inspiration from other writers, including James Baldwin, and quoted one of her favorite lines: “The only real concern of the artist is to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

Trethewey said she kept the Baldwin quotation inside a notebook during graduate school alongside a small poem by celebrated African American poet Lucille Clifton, titled “why some people be mad at me sometimes:”

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine.

Offering a window into her writing process, Trethewey explained how she handles obstacles in her writing process.

 “Often if I’m in the middle of writing a poem and I get stuck,” she said, “In my mind it’s always because I don’t know enough. That’s when I’ll stop and go and do some research. … I mull it over in my head until I finally have to sit down and do the work. One doesn’t wait for inspiration, you have to go and find it.”

She said she spends a lot of time reading, thinking, and conducting research. Her process often involves turning to the work of poets she admires, which involves her “entering into a conversation with the work that came before mine.”

“Poems are records of the best and happiest times in the happiest and best minds,” she said. “So even when I’m writing about something traumatic or difficult, I am at my happiest when I am in the act of making.”

Currently, Trethewey said she is working on an upcoming memoir about her father and another collection of poems. 

“Every day is the attempt to write the next poem. That’s what comes next.”

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