One Book One Pass Committee Selects Book from Poet Laureate

Gazebo Gazette

The One Book One Pass Committee announced that our 2021 selection is Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author Natasha Trethewey from Gulfport, Mississippi on Wednesday, August 11, 2021.

Over the next several weeks, the community will be encouraged to read the book and engage in book discussions, panel discussions, and other programs that will culminate in the Author Presentation by Natasha Trethewey on Tuesday, October 12th at 6:30 pm at the Randolph Center in Pass Christian.  

Memorial Drive:  A Daughter’s Memoir is a chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.

Natasha Trethewey, who was born in Gulfport, Mississippi,  is a Pulitzer Prize-winner who served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012-2016).

In addition to the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); she is the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), a book of nonfiction ; and five collections of poetry including Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

She is the recipient of many awards, fellowships and honors, including the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress. Ms. Trethewey teaches at Northwestern University where she is the Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Additionally, Trethewey received the Cora Norman Award in recognition of her literary career from the Mississippi Humanities Council on March 26, 2021.

Copies of Memorial Drive:  A Daughter’s Memoir are available for check out at the Pass Christian Library or for purchase at Pass Christian Books.   

Please call the library (228-452-4596) or email passchristianlibrary@gmail.com if you have any questions or need further information or visit https://www.facebook.com/One-Book-One-Pass-1039070059489155/ for more.