The lines from James Applewhite's poem that serve as my epigraph recollect an exchange with Natasha Trethewey during a conference session about southern poetic responses to the Civil War. Trethewey's claim, “It was not my war,” disavows not the war and its surrounding histories per se but more precisely Fugitive Allen Tate's mournful angst over the Confederacy's failure in “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928). Tate's elegiac poem reflects a modernist reboot of the Cult of the Lost Cause. Tate was a white, male writer who grew up in privilege at the turn of the twentieth century. Trethewey, by contrast, is a female writer of mixed race who was the child of a marriage between a white father (poet Eric Trethewey) and a black mother (social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough). According to Mississippi legal statutes in 1965, miscegenation, a term first coined during the Civil War, was illegal; therefore Trethewey, the product of this taboo marriage, was born into “psychological exile” as a mixed race child. Consequently, Trethewey has no truck with Tate's Eliotic worrying of the wound left by the Confederate States of America's (CSA) defeat and dissolution. Instead, Trethewey's purported response rhymes with sociologist Larry J. Griffin's observation that the Civil War was in fact a victory for millions of southerners – namely, those African Americans newly emancipated from enslavement. To make the war hers, Trethewey rewrites the dominant historiographic record to reveal heretofore underwritten episodes, especially the accomplishments of more than 200,000 African American soldiers who served during the war. Trethewey's impulse is toward countermemory: to trace residual, resistant strains of these alternate histories, to build out of her poetry a collective cenotaph to the Black Union dead.

Currently Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Trethewey (born 1966; active 2000–present) is a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, and has become one of the most visible and highly honored contemporary American poets.