One of the most influential literary voices of the past quarter century is coming to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga not simply to read her work, but to address why the humanities continue to matter in American public life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and two-term U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will deliver a free, public lecture titled “The Role of the Humanities in Our Personal and Civic Lives” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 5, in the University Center Tennessee Room. The event is presented as part of the O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities series.
The University Center is located at 710 Mocs Alumni Dr. (710 E. 5th St. in some GPS systems). Parking is available in the adjacent Lupton Hall Parking Garage (700 Vine St.) and is free beginning at 5 p.m. Other nearby parking garages will be reserved that evening for a basketball game at McKenzie Arena.
The event will include a lecture by Trethewey, readings from her work, a question-and-answer session and a book signing. Books will be available for purchase at the lecture through Barnes & Noble.
The lecture is sponsored by The Lyndhurst Foundation, the UTC Honors College O’Dea Lecture Series, the UTC Division of Access and Engagement, The Keese Lecture Series and the UTC Department of English.
Trethewey’s visit is designed to reach far beyond campus, said UTC Honors College Dean Linda Frost. “We are bringing a nationally significant voice to Chattanooga, one whose work resonates with students, educators and community members alike.
“Natasha Trethewey is a very important writer who—as a two-term poet laureate—has had the highest position that a writer can have in the United States. She can talk very eloquently and powerfully about the role of literature, the arts and the humanities in social and civic life.”
Trethewey, a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. She is the author of five collections of poetry: “Monument” (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; “Thrall” (2012); “Native Guard” (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; “Bellocq’s Ophelia” (2002); and “Domestic Work” (2000), which 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. “Domestic Work” won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
In addition to her poetry, Trethewey is the author of two memoirs, “The House of Being” (2024) and “Memorial Drive” (2020), and a book of nonfiction, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (2010).
Trethewey is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2012, she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi, and in 2013, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She will remain on campus the following day to spend time with Honors College students, including first-year Brock Scholars who study her work as part of their Honors curriculum.
“Students who have been reading her work in class will have the opportunity to meet her and talk with her in a more informal setting,” Frost said. “That matters. It brings the work off the page and into conversation.”
The O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities series is named for retired UC Foundation Professor of English Gregory O’Dea, who spent more than 25 years shaping honors education at UTC. O’Dea joined the faculty in 1990, was selected as assistant director of the honors program in the mid-1990s, and was later promoted to director. After the program evolved into the Honors College in 2013, he served as assistant dean before returning to full-time teaching.
“One of the reasons for the founding of the O’Dea Lecture in the Humanities series was to reaffirm the importance of humanities-based thinking at a time when its value is often questioned,” Frost said. “Natasha Trethewey will speak powerfully to that.”