Natasha Trethewey

Beyond Katrina

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Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.
Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.
Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.
A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
This book is currently unavailable
106 printed pages
Original publication
2010
Publication year
2010
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Quotes

  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted4 years ago
    Talbot Brewer and the Page-Barbour Lecture Series at the University of Virginia where, in 2007, I presented some sections of this book.
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted4 years ago
    Thanks also to the Virginia Quarterly Review, in whose pages some of this work first appeared, and to Professor
  • Menna Abu Zahrahas quoted4 years ago
    There are many people to whom I owe a great deal of thanks: Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, without whose ideas and encouragement this book would never have been written; Erika Stevens, editor at the University of Georgia Press, whose vision, compassion, and empathy guided me through to the final word; my agent, Rob McQuilkin, whose advice is always just right; Aesha Qawiy, Tamara Jones, Susan Glisson, Tayari Jones, and D. Allen Mitchell—a congregation of supporters whose knowledge and generosity kept me going and who were always willing to talk through anything I asked; all the folks in Mississippi, some named in these pages and some not, who answered graciously my many questions; my husband, Brett, whose ongoing support is immeasurable; and finally, my brother Joe—whose story was always the story.
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