Poet laureate Natasha Trethewey has inked a book deal with HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint to publish her as-yet-untitled memoir.

Lippincott Massie McQuilkin agent Rob McQuilkin negotiated the deal with publisher Daniel Halpern in a “very heated auction.” Publication has been set for 2014. Halpern called it “a story that no one is likely to forget.”

Here’s more from the release: “Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America.  Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.”