2018-2019 Visiting Scholar

Pulitzer Prize-winner and two-term Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014) to Visit Swarthmore Campus as Phi Beta Kappa Scholar

Join the campus community on Thursday, December 6th at 4:15pm in Kohlberg Scheurer Room to hear Natasha Trethewey, 2018-2019 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

Natasha Trethewey is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. Previously Professor Trethewey spent 15 years at Emory University, most recently as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing. She served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014) and is the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall. In 2010 she published a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program has been offering undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students. Now in its 61st year, the Visiting Scholar Program has sent 648 Scholars on 5,288 two-day visits.