Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey's very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.
Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother's extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren's book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother's efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.
Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey's attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.
A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.
- Always Available Adult Fiction eBooks
- Always Available Adult Nonfiction eBooks
- Most Popular Adult Fiction eBooks in 2022
- Most Popular Adult Nonfiction eBooks in 2022
- Mystery eBooks
- Science Fiction eBooks
- Fantasy eBooks
- History eBooks
- Most Popular Adult Fiction eBooks 2023
- Most Popular Adult Nonfiction eBooks 2023
- See all
- Always Available Adult Fiction Audiobooks
- Always Available Adult Nonfiction eBooks
- Most Popular Adult Fiction Audiobooks in 2022
- Most Popular Adult Nonfiction Audiobooks in 2022
- Mystery Audiobooks
- Biography and Autobiography Audiobooks
- Business Audiobooks
- Listening to History
- ZORA Canon: Greatest books by African American Women
- Most Popular Adult Fiction Audiobooks 2023
- See all
- Food and Drink
- Health and Fitness
- Special Issues
- Seasonal Special Issues
- Most Popular Magazine Titles 2023
- See all