Elizabeth Alexander

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 Foundation since 2018.

Previously, Alexander was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation. She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. In 2022, Time named Alexander one of 100 Most Influential People in World.

Early life and education Alexander was born in Harlem, New York City, and grew up in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander Jr. and Adele Logan Alexander, a professor of African-American women's history at George Washington University and writer. Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a member of the president-elect's transition team. She soon realized that "it wasn't the life I wanted."

In 2007, Alexander became the first recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, an annual prize awarded by Poets & Writers that "honors an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition." 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 at Yale. In 2015, Alexander was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2016, she became the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Yale University in 2018. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Works 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 at the Yale School of Drama, garnered her a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship as well as an Illinois Arts Council award.

Her 2005 volume of poetry American Sublime was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize of that year. Alexander is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior. Alexander received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry in 2010.

2009 U.S. presidential inauguration On January 20, 2009, at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, Alexander recited her poem "Praise Song for the Day", which she had composed for the occasion.

The announcement of her selection was favorably received by her fellow poets Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times Book editor, and most critics found that "her poem was too much like prose," and that "her delivery [was] insufficiently dramatic." Adam Kirsch of The New Republic found the poem "dull, 'bureaucratic' and found it proved that 'the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.'"

Alexander wrote of her experience of reading at the inauguration in The New Yorker in January 2017. Alexander brought her father, who had attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, to sit next to her at the inauguration. At the rehearsal for the inauguration, Alexander read Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "kitchenette building".

Personal life Alexander's mother is a member of the Logan family, a part of the old African-American upper class. Her grandfather was Dr. Arthur C. Logan and her greataunt was Dr. Myra Adele Logan. Alexander was married to Ficre Ghebreyesus until his death in April 2012. She lives with their two sons in New York City. In 2010, Alexander participated in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS series Faces of America, which explored her ancestry and analyzed her DNA.