Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) and Memorial Drive (2020) nudge readers towards revisionist perspectives on African American history. As a mixed-race poet who critiques myopic collective memory and who contemplates her role as a creative writer, Trethewey continues the work of African American poets like Robert Hayden whose research-based poems address blind spots in historiography. In addition, she employs her family’s and especially her mother’s life story as projection screens for the long-term impact of erasing African Americans from mainstream historical accounts. The poignancy of her blending of complex literary forms with reflections on collective, family, and personal memory is heightened through the in-depth contemplation of individual responsibility and even guilt at not speaking up or acting early enough to save her mother’s life or to preserve her memory—which thus blends into the African American historiographic dilemma. Native Guard (2006) and Memorial Drive (2020) demonstrate that both figurative language and fact-based memory merge to become tools of survival in the context of personal and collective trauma.