A Meditation on Writing with Natasha Trethewey
Time: 12:30 – 1:15 PM
Location: The DeKalb County Stage in the Sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Decatur, 308 Clairemont Ave, Decatur, Georgia 30030
In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a pasture: a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.
The 19th Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey is joined by Rosemary M. Magee for an intimate conversation on the origins of her writing and the creation of her latest release, The House of Being (2024). The panel discussion will be held Saturday, October 5 at 12:30 PM on the The DeKalb County Stage in the Sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Decatur. Following the panel, Natasha will proceed to the signing tables to autograph books.
Purchase your book from Eagle Eye Bookshop using this link, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the festival.
About the Moderator
Rosemary M. Magee served for three decades in wide-ranging roles at Emory University as a faculty member, dean, and vice president and secretary of the university. As director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library (where Trethewey’s papers are housed) from 2012-2018, she was closely involved with the acquisition of the Flannery O’Connor collection, papers of Harper Lee, and letters of former U.S. President Barack Obama—while at the same time expanding African American and Irish literary collections. Among her publications are two edited volumes, “Conversations with Flannery O’Connor: Selected Interviews” and “Friendship and Sympathy: Communities of Southern Writers.” She recently completed a collection of short stories, Fantasy Impromptu, and was co-curator of the exhibition At the Crossroads: The Lives and Works of Three Georgia Artists. She holds a Ph.D. from Emory in Southern literature and religion and served on the board of the Decatur Book Festival for 10 years.