Mississippi has several prolific and revered writers that have continuously contributed to expanding the minds and imaginations of people throughout the world. The Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area was pleased to sponsor two historical markers on the Mississippi Writers Trail to honor the literary contributions of Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey.
Jesmyn Ward, a DeLisle native, is an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She is an American novelist who has won the 2011 and 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, a 2012 Alex Award for her second novel and the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”
Natasha Trethewey, a Gulfport native, is a professor of English and a creative writer at Emory University in Atlanta. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her collection “Native Guard.” She was named Mississippi’s poet laureate in January of 2012 for a four-year term. The Library of Congress named her the nation’s 19th poet laureate in June 2012. She is the first person to serve simultaneously as poet laureate for the nation and a state.
To ensure the integrity of the project, scholars with extensive Mississippi literary expertise have been selected by the Mississippi Writers Trail Advisory Committee to identify and research the appropriate language for each marker.
To learn more about the Mississippi Writer’s Trail Charitable Fund, please visit formississippi.org.
