Gulfport native Natasha Tretheway won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday for “Native Guard,” a collection about black Civil War soldiers who helped protect a fort on Ship Island, a few miles off the Mississippi coast.

Tretheway is an associate professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. She could not immediately be reached Monday.

The Emory University Web site says Tretheway’s first poetry collection, “Domestic Work” won the first 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize, which is selected by noted poet Rita Dove. Tretheway also received the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Her second collection, “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association.

The Web site for the Academy of American Poets says Tretheway was born in Gulfport in 1966.