Natasha Trethewey — Native Guard, Gulfport

On April 26, 1966, Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport. Her parents had traveled to Ohio to marry — interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi at the time. Her birth certificate noted her mother's race as "colored" and her father's as "Canadian." The U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia a year later. In 2007, Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard. The collection recovers the story of the Louisiana Native Guards, an all-black Union regiment composed mainly of former slaves who guarded Confederate prisoners of war. The regiment was stationed on Ship Island, the same barrier island where Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville first landed in 1699 to establish the French colony that became Louisiana. Trethewey's mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was part of the inspiration for the collection, which is dedicated to her memory. Turnbough was murdered in 1985 by her second husband when Trethewey was nineteen. Trethewey served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, from 2012 to 2014. She was the first laureate to take up residence in Washington, D.C., when she did so in January 2013. In 2010, she published Beyond Katrina, an account of the hurricane's impact on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where she grew up. The book combines nonfiction with poetry to document the damage to her friends, family, and neighbors. A Mississippi Writers Trail marker stands in Gulfport. Ship Island, the landscape she wrote about in Native Guard, is accessible by ferry.