TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the novel “Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir” written by Natasha Trethewey has been released in the Iranian book market.

Tadaee Publications has published the book, a New York Times bestseller, with a translation by Forouzan Saedi, ISNA reported.

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother when she was 19. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became in the book.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Natasha Trethewey, 58, is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.

Recalling her reaction to her mother's death, she said, “that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened”.

Natasha’s father is also a poet; he is a professor of English at Hollins University. She earned her B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. In May 2010, she delivered the commencement speech at Hollins University and was awarded an honorary doctorate. She had previously received an honorary degree from Delta State University in her native Mississippi.

Structurally, her work combines free verse with more structured, traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle. Thematically, her work examines “memory and the racial legacy of America”.

SS/SAB