Fall 2009

Natasha Trethewey, a VQR contributing editor, served two terms as the nineteenth poet laureate of the United States (2012 – 2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry: Monument (HMH, 2018), which was longlisted for the National Book Award; Thrall (HMH, 2012); Native Guard (Mariner, 2007), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002); and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 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. Trethewey is also the author of the memoir Memorial Drive (Ecco, 2020). 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.

Simon Maxwell Apter is the online editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. He is a regular reviewer for NPR’s Books We Like department, and his commentary and criticism have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, the Guardian, the American Prospect, and other publications. A former bread baker from Corvallis, Oregon, he currently lives in Brooklyn.