
The 13th Annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading featuring Natasha Trethewey
Join us on November 3, 2022 at 6:00 PM
UC Santa Cruz, Merrill College Cultural Center
Please join us for the 13th annual Morton Marcus Poetry Reading, featuring honored guest Natasha Trethewey. Poet Gary Young will host the program, and the evening will include an announcement of the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Contest (recipient receives a $1,000 prize).
These annual readings keep the spirit of Marcus' work and writing alive, bringing the best national poets to Santa Cruz and the art of poetry to a new generation. This was a huge part of Mort's work when he was alive, and we are thrilled that his legacy continues through this annual event.

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.