Natasha Trethewey has just been named the 19th US Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey, 46, is an English and and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the second poet laureate to hail from the U.S. South.

She won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for "Native Guard," a book of poems that centered around unrecorded and forgotten history of Native Guard, a regiment of black Union soldiers stationed on Ship Island in Louisiana during the Civil War.

Trethewey delved into the world of poetry after her mother was murdered by her step-father when she was a 19-year-old college student. She has said that writing poetry gave her the space to grieve. "I started writing poems as a response to that great loss, much the way that people responded, for example, after 9/11," she told The Associated Press. "People who never had written poems or turned much to poetry turned to it at that moment because it seems like the only thing that can speak the unspeakable."

She also said that it was a dare that had her penning her very first poem. "On a dare that first semester, a poet friend of mine got me to write a poem. I did it because I thought I would prove that I couldn't do it," she said. "It was at that moment that something really clicked."

Apart from her mother's death, Tretheway has written about other personal tragedies and experiences as the bi-racial daughter of a white father and a black mother who had to drive to Ohio to get married because miscegenation was illegal in Mississippi, their home state.

James Billington of the Library of Congress told the AP that he chose Tretheway because ""She's taking us into history that was never written," he told the AP. "She takes the greatest human tragedy in American history - the Civil War, 650,000 people killed, the most destructive war of human life for a century - and she takes us inside without preaching."

Trethewey will be the first poet laureate to work in the Library of Congress' newly set up Poetry Room.