Monumental Opportunities

Natasha Trethewey, Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, 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). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020); a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and five collections of poetry, including Monument: Poems New & Selected (2018), which was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award, and Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 

David Blight is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of many books on Southern history, memory and the Civil War, and resistance to slavery, including his biography of Frederick Douglass, entitled, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which was honored with nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. 

Katie Burnett is an associate professor of English and chair of the department of Arts & Languages at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. She is the author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (LSU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022) and the Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (Routledge Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2022), the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge, 2021), the essay collection Southern Comforts, PMLA, College Literature, and the Southern Literary Journal.