Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States and the College's 2014 Commencement speaker, will read from her four poetry collections at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 21 in Alumni Hall on the Knox College campus.

Her reading, which will take place in Alumni Hall's Petrovich Atrium, is the keynote address for Galesburg's annual Sandburg Days Festival.

Trethewey will read selections from her books 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.

The event is free and open to the public.

"We are honored to welcome Ms. Trethewey back to the Knox campus this spring, particularly as we celebrate National Poetry Month and the 20th annual Carl Sandburg Days festival here in Galesburg," said Knox College President Teresa L. Amott. "Creative writing has always been a source of pride and inspiration on the Knox campus. I know that our students and faculty are enthusiastic about Natasha Trethewey's nationally acclaimed work and in learning more from her about the art of writing itself."

While on the Knox campus, Trethewey also will engage in an informal discussion with members of the Knox community on Wednesday, April 22. The invitation-only event will provide Knox students, faculty, and staff an opportunity to ask Trethewey about the art of poetry and reflective nonfiction.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work, 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 and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

She has published three more collections of poetry and one book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which appeared in 2010.

Trethewey's 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.

She currently serves as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. In 2012, she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States.