Editor’s Note: Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, will visit campus today and tomorrow to participate in a poetry reading and a book signing. What follows is an excerpt from a phone interview with Trethewey about her writing and Pulitzer experience.

Today, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey will conduct a public conversation entitled "Poetry and Memory," with poet and OU professor Honorée Jeffers. The event is free and open to the public and will be held in Gaylord Library at the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at 7 pm.

On Feb. 24, Trethewey will present a poetry reading of her Pulitzer-winning book, “Native Guard.” A book signing and reception will follow. This event is free and will be held in the auditorium of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at 7 p.m.

Q: In your books, you often find largely unknown histories to illuminate and discuss. How do you approach finding these historical stories for your poetry?

A: Well, I think that I kind of stumbled upon the lesser-known history of the “Native Guard.” I often have an assignment that I give my students about uncovering lesser-known histories.

I was at Auburn University at my first job, and there was a marker in the center of town right in front of campus that was apparently telling something about how Auburn was founded. And it read something like “after the Indians left,” which is as if they had just woken up one morning and said, “Man, this is a drag; let’s move West.” It’s as if they hadn’t given consideration to the Trail of Tears or other parts of history.

So one way to go about uncovering unknown histories is to do research around historical markers, and ask what’s not there, what has been left out.

Q: Why do you find writing what has been erased to be so important?

A: Well, somebody’s got to tell the stories! That’s the only way we’re going to have a fuller version of our history as Americans and our history as people across time and space. It’s our place to tell a fuller version of the story. And that’s why the telling of a lot of histories that have been forgotten or given little recognition.

Q: Whose work would you say influenced your writing most?

A: There’s never a “most.” There’re always different influences. In particular, for example, in writing “Native Guard,” I was deeply influenced by Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, their histories of place, of psychological exile. A collegue knew this and gave me all of the drafts of Heaney’s poems because we had them here in our collections at Emory. So I got to see his entire thought process over the working of that poem collection.

Q: What was it like to win the Pulitzer? What was the feeling?

A: It was pretty unbelievable; that’s what the feeling was. I couldn’t stop shaking for a long time, and then for months after, my right eye twitched. (Laughs.)

You don’t know if you’re a finalist, so it comes as a surprise. The announcment goes out, and the winner and the two finalists all find out at the same time.

The Pulitzer Board publishes it on their Web site and you find out because reporters start calling you. And I was teaching a class so my phone was turned off, so it took a long time before anyone could reach me. They started finally calling the English department, and then the creative writing administrative person got the call and ran over to my building. It was pretty unbelievable and thrilling.

Q:Your poetry seems to exhibit a great deal of restraint, without suffering from vagueness. How do you create that balance in your work?

A: I often think it’s about technique. Particularly in the "Native Guard," I searched for a lot of traditional forms. I find that having those forms [helps with] restraint. They allow for the reigning in of difficult material, different difficult emotional material as well as difficult historical material. I think it gives shape to it in a way; it keeps me from becoming nostalgic.

Q: Do you have somewhere you like to write or a ritual to your writing process, or is it just when inspiration takes you?

A: I don’t believe in trying to wait for inspiration, though certainly I welcome it when it comes. I do write in my study in the top floor of my house because it’s sunny and cozy. But I also write a lot on airplanes because I’m on them so much. As a matter of fact, just now, I was working on a poem on the two hour flight from Philadelphia to Atlanta.

SD: Is that poem part of a current project?

NT: Yeah, it is. Part of the project of my next book.

SD: Do you have some kind of historic frame in that one too, as you do in some of the other books?

NT: There is. I think I’m always asking myself a historical question, because of my obsession with historical memory and erasure. There’s always something there that’s guiding me. Now, I’m working on a collection of poems about Mexican casta painting.

SD: That’s great. How did you come to find those?

NT: Well, I was at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and there was a place where a lot of different scholars and artists and writers come spend a month doing work and having conversation with each other. And I always find that one of the best things is getting in contact with scholars whose interests are very different. In this case, the woman was a Shakespearean scholar. She had been doing some research at a museum and had seen some of these paintings. Because they were meant to display and depict, for the Indians, things that were going on in the colonies and the children of those [mixed race] unions, she thought I would be interested in them. Just like the time I found out about the "Native Guard" at a restaurant, I was hooked.

Q: You once said in an interview"Native Guard" "... represents the idea that I am a native guardian to the memory of my mother’s life." Do you think all writers should be guardian to something?

A: Well, I actually go further to say that I am the guardian of the historical memory of my South and my Mississippi. I do think that, as [Percy Bysshe] Shelley said, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” And we are often charged with the cultural memory of a people. That’s a kind of guardianship.