Natasha Trethewey is a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, and the author of three collections of poetry; the most recent, Native Guard, was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Her other awards include the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair and professor of poetry at Emory University.
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Joshua Cogan is a documentary photographer and anthropologist based in Washington, DC. His work for LiveHopeLove.com, based on his photojournalism alongside writer Kwame Dawes for “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica” (VQR, Spring 2008) was the winner of a News and Documentary Emmy Award and the Webby People’s Voice award.
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Once, I was a daughter of this place:
daughter of Gwen, granddaughter
of Leretta, great of Eugenia McGee.
I was baptized in the church
my great-aunt founded, behind
the drapes my grandmother sewed.
As a child, I dozed in the pews
and woke to chant the Lord’s Prayer—
mouthing the lines I did not learn.
Virginia Quarterly Review
