"Knox is a place I feel deeply connected to" because of poetry and history, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natasha Trethewey told a crowd of nearly 200 people who gathered recently at Knox College to hear some of her work. "This place seems to represent both of those for me."

The April 21 event, called "An Evening with Natasha Trethewey," was the keynote address for Galesburg's annual Sandburg Days Festival.

Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States and Knox's 2014 Commencement speaker, read several powerful selections from her books of poetry. She is author of Thrall; Bellocq's Ophelia; Domestic Work, which won the inaugural Cave Canem Prize for the best first book by an African American poet; and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She currently serves as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

As she read her poems, Trethewey described her personal background -- including being the daughter of a white man and an African American woman -- and the historical context of some of her writing, which often explores racial attitudes.

A day after her poetry reading, Trethewey spoke in a more informal setting with about two dozen Knox students during a lunchtime discussion.

Alex Lieberman '15, a creative writing major from Northbrook, Illinois, said he enjoyed having an opportunity to chat with Trethewey, a renowned writer.

"It's inspiring," he said. "I really appreciated that she had a nice conversation with me. We talked about Star Trek." Lieberman explained that the classic science fiction television show often focused on racial themes, such as Spock's struggle to reconcile his half-Vulcan, half-human background.

Kathryn Todd '15, a Spanish major from Chicago, Illinois, noted that Trethewey's previous trip to the Knox campus was almost a year ago, when she was the 2014 Commencement speaker.

Todd added that Trethewey is "reaching five years of Knox students" because she spoke to the graduating seniors of 2014 last year, and to members of the Classes of 2015 through 2018 during her latest visit.

"I think it was really great to have her here as a guest (again)," Todd said. "It showed she was interested in talking to current students, and it sort of brings everything full circle."

In addition to her books of poetry, Trethewey also is author of a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which appeared in 2010.

Her many awards and honors include 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.

She has held appointments at Duke University, as the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies; the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and Yale University, where she was the James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her poetry collection Native Guard.