Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey has been named Oregon State University’s 2026 recipient of the Stone Award for Literary Achievement.
Trethewey will present an evening of poetry and conversation at 7 p.m. Friday, May 8, at OSU’s Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx). The event costs $10 or $5 for OSU students.
The Stone Award, which includes a $20,000 honorarium, recognizes major American authors with bodies of critically acclaimed work that influence multiple generations of writers, readers and thinkers. It was last awarded to Indigenous author, botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer in 2024.
“The Stone Award highlights the enduring, essential importance of literary arts at Oregon State,” College of Liberal Arts Dean Philip Williams said. “In honoring Natasha Trethewey’s body of work, we are also honoring the role that poetry and literature play in expanding awareness and cultivating connection.”
Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 2006 collection of poetry, “Native Guard,” published in 2006. The poems explore grief, memory, race and belonging, interweaving personal elegies with archival recovery of the first officially recognized Black regiments of the Union Army during the Civil War. She later served two terms as U.S. poet laureate, from 2012 to 2014, further cementing her influence.
“Trethewey engages the immediacy and roots of American racial experience — a wicked mixture of lingering violence, resilience, tenderness and tumult — with a careful touch and keen sense of arrangement,” said David Biespiel, poet-in-residence in OSU’s School of Writing, Literature, and Film. “Her writing is meticulous, elegant and quietly forceful.”
During her visit to OSU, Trethewey will meet with undergraduate and graduate students, keeping with the Stone Award’s emphasis on building community and enriching the next generation of writers.
“In a culture saturated with data and distraction, poetry invites us to slow down, to listen attentively, and to be present with truths and feelings too often neglected,” said Tim Jensen, director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film.
One of the largest prizes of its kind given by any university in the nation, the Stone Award was established in 2011 by Patrick and Vicki Stone with a gift to the OSU Foundation to spotlight OSU’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film. Past award recipients include Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead, Lynda Barry and Rita Dove.
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