Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey will hold a reading next month at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Trethewey will read from her award-winning book, “Native Guard,” Sept. 3. She’ll be the first author participating in a series of readings sponsored by USM’s Center for Writers and the Center for Black Studies.

Trethewey also will offer a question and answer session Sept. 4 for graduate students in the center.

A Gulfport native and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Trethewey has penned three poetry collections. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard, in which the title poem is about black Union soldiers from Louisiana who guarded Confederate prisoners at Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island from 1862 to 1865.