The role of the national poet laureate should be to raise awareness of the art form, Natasha Trethewey said, and she enthusiastically performed that task in Greenville last week with a group of East Carolina University students.

Tretheway, named poet laureate on June 7, said during a visit to ECU as part of the university’s Contemporary Writers Series that one of her jobs is to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of poetry.

“I think there are a lot of ways you can do it — presentations like this, meeting people one on one,” she said during a question-and-answer session at the Greenville Museum of Art prior to a public reading held later in the day.

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