Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander (17 February 1951 – 21 November 2018) was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Early life and education Meena Alexander was born Mary Elizabeth Alexander on 17 February 1951 in Allahabad, India, to George and Mary (Kuruvilla) Alexander, Her father was a meteorologist for the Indian government and her mother was a homemaker. Her maternal grandfather was a theologian and social reformer who worked with Gandhi, and had been the principal of Marthoma Seminary in Kottayam; he gave Alexander a variety of books, and talked to her about serious topics such as mortality, the Buddha, and apocalypse, before he died when she was eleven years old. She continued to visit her grandparents in Kerala, was tutored at home on speaking and writing English, and finished high school in Khartoum at age 13. In 1969, she completed a bachelor's degree in English and French from Khartoum University.

After completing her PhD, Alexander returned to India, and was a lecturer in the English Department at Miranda House, University of Delhi in 1974, a lecturer in English and French at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, a lecturer in English at the Central Institute of English at the University of Hyderabad, from 1975 to 1977, during the National Emergency in India,

Career Alexander wrote poetry, prose, and scholarly works in English. While she lived in Khartoum, she had been taught to speak and write British English;

After moving to New York, Alexander was an assistant professor at Fordham University from 1980 until 1987, when she became an assistant professor in the English Department at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She became an associate professor in 1989, and a professor in 1992. in 1999. In her 1986 collection House of a Thousand Doors: Poems and Prose Pieces, she republished several poems from her early works and her 1980 collection Stone Roots, as well as work previously published in journals in addition to new material. and Poetics of Dislocation published in 2009.

Alexander also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991), which was a Village Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice in 1991, In 1993, Alexander published her autobiographical memoir, Fault Lines, and published an expanded second edition in 2003, with new material that addressed her previously suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her maternal grandfather and her reflections on the September 11 attacks. Some of her poetry was adapted into music, including her poems "Impossible Grace" and "Acqua Alta". which was later published in slightly revised form in World Literature Today. In 1998 she was a Member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She served as an Elector, American Poets' Corner, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York. and according to her husband, the cause was endometrial serous cancer. In 2020, her poetry collection In Praise of Fragments was published, which includes some work previously published in journals or staged as performances, as well as new material.

Influences Influences on her writing include Jayanta Mahapatra, as well as Toru Dutt, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Sarojini Naidu, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, Nawal El Saadawi, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. She also held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a poet at Yaddo. 1988 Center for American Culture Studies, Columbia University, Writer in Residence 2008 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow 2011 Fulbright Specialists Program 2014 National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books of 1993, and her poetry collection Illiterate Heart won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award. In 2016, she received a Word Masala award from the Word Masala Foundation. On 1 May 2024, she was honored with a Google Doodle, in honor of it being the first day of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

Selected works

Poetry Early work The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976) (long poem) I Root My Name (Calcutta: United Writers, 1977) (collection) Without Place (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1977) (long poem) In the Middle Earth (New Delhi: Enact, 1977) (performance piece)

Chapbooks

Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems (Al-Quds University, 2012)

Novels

Memoirs

Criticism

Edited works (US) (UK)

Prefaces and introductory notes Introduction to Truth Tales: Stories by Contemporary Indian Women Writers (Feminist Press, 1990) About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston said: "Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted." As to the anthology she edited, Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing, Simon Gikandi wrote: "Name Me A Word is an indispensable guide for readers of Indian writing, animating the powerful impulses of the country's famous writers and introducing the multiple voices that went into the making of the most important literature of our time."

Critical studies of Alexander's work Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander. Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts (eds). Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

Guiyou Huang, ed., Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 2002)

Personal life At the time of her death, Alexander was survived by her mother, her husband, their children Adam Lelyveld and Svati Lelyveld, and her sister Elizabeth Alexander.