On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, USA, as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 205 kilometres per hour, breaching the levee system protecting New Orleans and flooding 80 percent of the city. The storm killed approximately 1,836 people, displaced over one million residents, and caused $125 billion in damage — making it one of the deadliest and most destructive natural disasters in American history. The catastrophic failure of federal flood protection, the abandonment of the predominantly Black residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, and the federal government's slow response made Katrina a defining event of early twenty-first-century American social and political life.

Hurricane Katrina generated one of the richest literary responses to any American natural disaster, with poets including Natasha Trethewey (who grew up on the Gulf Coast and whose mother was killed in an unrelated violent act), Yusef Komunyakaa, and Brenda Marie Osbey writing major elegies engaging the storm's intersection of wind, water, race, and governmental abandonment. Trethewey's Native Guard (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and her later collection Beyond Katrina (2010) made the Gulf Coast wind-landscape central to her meditation on American racial history. The storm permanently altered the relationship between environmental poetry and questions of racial and social justice.