sense the matter your right to point out. thanks everyone. it is much more in the book. [applause] i will be signing books outside. thank you. >> [inaudible conversations] to introduce you to somebody on the bus with us and that is natasha trethewey who is the u.s. poet laureate. what is a u.s. poet laureate and what do they do? >> the job is pretty simple. it's to bring poetry to a wider

audience across the country. the only official duties i have far to open the literary season of the congress in the fall by giving a reading in the closing lecture in maine to end the literary season and to choose the two poets were the one in some years who is to receive from the award and introduce them. do you get a salary? >> there is a stipend that comes with it but it isn't funded by the american public. there is an endowment that does that. >> what is the scholarship that you referred to? >> the scholarship recognizes an american poet who is doing extraordinary work. >> how do you become the u.s. poet laureate? are you a poet? >> you have to be a poet first so if you're thinking about doing it first start writing some poems. the poet laureate is choose by dr. james billington the library of congress. and he's given that duty by

congress. congress enacted law that made or i suppose maybe it's not a law, but the position of the laureate ship in 1986. it used to be the consultant in poetry for many years. the first was joseph of slander. but in 1986 a change to the different title, the united states poet laureate. >> what is your position in the state of mississippi? >> i am also the poet laureate of mississippi. >> who chooses that? >> the outgoing governor haley barbour selected be. >> is that the term the position? >> it is and used to be a lifetime position. but with my term, the previous poet laureate by it and they decide to make it a termed position and is now four years. >> we can characterize authors as a novelist or a historian. can you characterize poets' the same way?

>> there are plenty of poets who also right in other shaun -- genres. you might call me a nonfiction writer because i have a book of nonfiction. but thinking of something my southern predecessor said, and that is the historical sense and the poetic sense shouldn't be seen as contradictory because if poetry is a little myth that we make than poetry is a myth that we live and constantly remake. so for me that suggests that there are lots of links between the different genres so even the we call someone a poet or novelist, i feel i'm someone who in the historical sense always animates the work i do. >> where did you grow up? >> mississippi and georgia. i was born in gulfport mississippi and moved to georgia later on. >> when and why did you start

writing poetry? >> i wrote poems pretty early on. my father might say even earlier than i would tell you. but when i was in the third grade in my earliest memory of writing poems happened then. i was riding in a class and i had a teacher who with the library and in my school down a little collection of the poems that i had written and put them in the school library to the estimate how many collections have you written and published? >> for collections of poetry. >> they all came out in 2012? >> that's right. >> are they really did poems or happen to be the latest? how was that done? >> my poems are related in that way. i tend to work on a kind of project so all of the poems circle around a particular question that i posed for myself. something i am trying to grapple with in language so they are very much connected. i think about robert frost's idea about the 25th pullen said

that even though there is a whole collection of individual poems, the book itself becomes the 25th poem, the unified whole of all of the things. >> my father is also a poet, and thraw is a good dedicated to my father i think of as in many ways an intimate conversation held in a very public place in the book between me and my father. it's about the history of ideas of racial difference across time and space. things i think we still contend with in our discourse and everyday lives as well as the intimate discourse in families. my interracial family. >> pulitzer prize winner. >> not that one. >> right, right, in 2007 he won the pulitzer. >> yes. >> how is poetry taut across the schools now? is it still taught in schools?

>> i don't know -- i don't know how much students are getting in school. i teach a freshman seminar at emory university. and my students have varying degrees of experience with poetry from their high schools. some have a lot more of it. some took creative writing as well as the study of petraeus literature in their class is. some haven't had much at all and i think it does vary depending on what school you go to. >> natasha trethewey, you have a memoir coming out. >> i have one my riding. >> and? >> i have one i'm writing. >> it's due in 2014. >> thanks for reminding me. [laughter] >> natasha trethewey who is the u.s. poet laureate, thanks for joining us of the national book festival on the c-span bus. we are the lou henry house on the campus at stanford university. it's significant because this was the primary residence of the

hoovers and significant as it relates to hoover because she was the one who designed it. she had a strong grasp of design and how she wanted the house to look even though she was not an architect or lucky to have a lot of the original drawings and documents and correspondence relating to the design and construction of how she wanted the house to look. >> the influence came from her travels in the southwest of the united states and also from her travels in north africa when she traveled with herbert hoover. it's a great legacy of lou henry because she designed the house, she created it. it was inspired by her ideas and she had a very close involvement in all aspects of the house's creation.

for the last 15 years, book tv has brought our viewers the national book award ceremony. in almost eight years this motion and gladys decided to buy a house in an old white neighborhood of detroit east side. they didn't do that in defense of any grand principle. they simply wanted a home in a safe and secure neighborhood. a home to be proud of. a home in which they could raise their daughter. but as a simple decision did raise grand principles because it forced them to confront the power of racial segregation. by then, the south already embraced jim-crow with all of its orders. but at that moment in the summer of 1925, segregation was

spreading north as well, splitting america's cities along the color line, forcing african-americans into distinct neighborhoods, separate and unequal, creating the nation's racial ghetto. so much has happened in the intervening decades. the south system of apartheid has been toppled in what i think is the greatest accomplishment for american democracy in the 21st century. there were no longer separate drinking fountains, separate waiting rooms, rules about sitting in the back of the bus. but 80 years on, the system of segregation that they confronted is still largely in place not just in detroit, but in almost all of urban america and putting this extraordinary city that we are in at the moment.

now on book tv, iian berman predict the collapse of russia deutsch to the internal social democratic decline and external challenges from china. it's about one hour. thank you. i love that john is making his way off the stage so when you throw things at me there is an unimpeded gift. thank you as always for your interest and to the heritage foundation for hosting me. always nice to come out and talk about issues i work a lot on in the privacy of my office and i think i will share it with a broad audience. let me start where john ended which is to talk about the external first and focus on the internal.