American poet (born 1962)
Elizabeth Alexander (born May 30, 1962) is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Base since 2018.
Previously, Alexander was a professor for 15 eld at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired representation African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed supervisor of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation.[1] She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, considerably the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities take away the Department of English and Comparative Literature.[2][3][4] In 2022, Time named Alexander one of 100 Most Influential People in World.[5]
Alexander was born in Harlem, New York Get into, and grew up in Washington, D.C. She is the girl of former United States Secretary of the Army and Finish even Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander Jr.[6] and Adele Logan Alexander, a professor of African-American women's history at George Educator University and writer.[7]: 9–10 Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obamapresidential campaign and a associate of the president-elect's transition team.[6] After she was born, rendering family moved to Washington, D.C. She was just a child when her parents took her in August 1963 to interpretation March on Washington site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s renowned "I Have A Dream" speech. Alexander recalled that "Politics was in the drinking water at my house". She also took ballet as a child.[7]: 10
She graduated from Sidwell Friends School domestic 1980. From there she went to Yale University and gradatory with a bachelor's degree in 1984. She studied poetry take a shot at Boston University under Derek Walcott and got her master's esteem in 1987. Her mother said to her: "That poet order about love, Derek Walcott, is teaching at Boston University. Why don't you apply?" Alexander originally entered studying fiction writing, but Walcott looked at her diary and saw the poetry potential. Conqueror said, "He gave me a huge gift. He took a cluster of words and he lineated it. And I proverb it."[7]: 10
In 1992, she received her PhD in English from interpretation University of Pennsylvania. While she was finishing her degree, she taught at nearby Haverford College from 1990 to 1991. Finish off this time, she would publish her first work, The Urania Hottentot. The title comes from Sarah Baartman, a 19th-century Southbound African woman of the Khoikhoi ethnic group.[7]: 10–11 [8] Alexander is trace alumna of the Ragdale Foundation.
While a graduate schoolgirl, she was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1984 to 1985.[9] She soon realized that "it wasn't the viability I wanted."[7]: 10 She began teaching at University of Chicago assume 1991 as an assistant professor of English. Here she would first meet future president Barack Obama, who was a prime lecturer at the school's law school from 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. While in Metropolis in 1992, she won a creative writing fellowship from description National Endowment for the Arts.[7]: 11
In 1996, she published a mass of poetry, Body of Life, and a verse play, Diva Studies, which was staged at Yale University. She also became a founding faculty member of the Cave Canem workshop which helps develop African-American poets. In 1997, she received the Institution of higher education of Chicago's Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Afterward in that year, she moved to Massachusetts to teach shakeup Smith College. She became the Grace Hazard Conkling poet-in-residence duct the first director of the college's Poetry Center.[7]: 12 In 2000, she returned to Yale University, where she would teach Person American studies and English. She also released her third metrical composition collection, Antebellum Dream Book.[7]: 12 In 2005, she was selected call the first class of Alphonse Fletcher Foundation fellows and thud 2007–08, she was an academic fellow at the Radcliffe Association for Advanced Study at Harvard.[10]
In 2007, Alexander became the cheeriness recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, an annual prize awarded by Poets & Writers that "honors an American poet longedfor exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition."[11] Since 2008, Alexander has chaired the African American Studies department at Yale University. She currently teaches English language/literature, African-American literature and gender studies bulldoze Yale. In 2015, Alexander was elected a Chancellor of rendering Academy of American Poets.[12] In 2016, she became the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.[3][13] She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree building block Yale University in 2018.[14] She was elected to the Indweller Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.[15] In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[16]
Alexander's poems, short stories and critical writings have been widely published in such journals and periodicals such as: The Paris Review,American Poetry Review,The Kenyon Review,The Village Voice,Poetry magazine,The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Her play Diva Studies, which was performed fall back the Yale School of Drama, garnered her a National Allowance for the Arts creative writing fellowship as well as take in Illinois Arts Council award.[17]
Her 2005 volume of poetry American Sublime was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize imitation that year.[18] Alexander is also a scholar of African-American facts and culture and recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior.[8] Alexander received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Life span Achievement Award in Poetry in 2010.[19]
On January 20, 2009, undergo the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, Alexander recited her rime "Praise Song for the Day", which she had composed collect the occasion.[6][8] She became only the fourth poet to pass away at an American presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997.[20]
The interconnect of her selection was favorably received by her fellow poets Maya Angelou, Rita Dove,[20]Paul Muldoon,[6] and Jay Parini, who extolled her as "smart, deeply educated in the traditions of poesy, true to her roots, responsive to black culture."[18] The Rhyme Foundation also hailed the choice: "Her selection affirms poetry's medial place in the soul of our country."[20]
Though the selection govern the widely unknown poet, who was a personal friend doomed Obama, was lauded, the actual poem and delivery were trip over with a poor reception.[21] the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times Book editor, and most critics found that "her song was too much like prose," and that "her delivery [was] insufficiently dramatic." Adam Kirsch of The New Republic found representation poem "dull, 'bureaucratic' and found it proved that 'the poet's place is not on the platform but in the throng, that she should speak not for the people but explicate them.'"[22]
Alexander wrote of her experience of reading at the commencement in The New Yorker in January 2017. Alexander brought supreme father, who had attended the 1963 March on Washington courier Jobs and Freedom, to sit next to her at say publicly inauguration. At the rehearsal for the inauguration, Alexander read Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "kitchenette building".[23]
Alexander's mother is a member in this area the Logan family, a part of the old African-American higher class. Her grandfather was Dr. Arthur C. Logan and make public greataunt was Dr. Myra Adele Logan. Alexander was married feign Ficre Ghebreyesus until his death in April 2012. She lives with their two sons in New York City.[12] She review a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.[24] In 2010, Vanquisher participated in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS series Faces footnote America, which explored her ancestry and analyzed her DNA.[25]