[1] She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard,[2] and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

She previously served as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she taught from 2001 to 2017.

Rarely has any poetic intersection of cultural and personal experience felt more inevitable, more painful, or profound.”[6] Trethewey was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Her parents traveled to Ohio to marry because their marriage was illegal in Mississippi at the time of Trethewey's birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia.

[8][9][10] Trethewey's mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was a social worker and part of the inspiration for Native Guard (2006), which is dedicated to her memory.

[19] Trethewey's first published poetry collection, Domestic Work (2000), was the inaugural recipient of the Cave Canem prize for a first book by an African-American poet.

Her work Beyond Katrina, published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, is an account of the devastating events that happened after the hurricane hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Her writing includes themes of race conflicts, memories of her family background, and the economic effects of what the hurricane caused.

Born on Confederate Memorial Day—exactly 100 years afterwards—Trethewey explains that she could not have "escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented", and that it had fascinated her since childhood.