Meena Alexander

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Meena Alexander (born 17 February 1951) is a noted cross-cultural writer and educator born in Allahabad, India, who currently lives and works in New York City. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of literary criticism. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

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[edit] Biography

Meena Alexander was born in to a family of Syrian Christians living in Allahabad. She was christened Mary Elizabeth but was called Meena from birth, and she changed her name to Meena at fifteen. Till the age of five she lived in Allahabad and Kerala. Then her father got a job in newly independent Sudan. In Khartoum she received an English education. She joined Khartoum University as an undergraduate aged only thirteen, and studied English. There she wrote her first poems which were translated into Arabic and published in a local newspaper. Five years later she did her PhD at Nottingham University in England and then returned to her parents in India. She taught at Delhi University and the University of Hyderabad.

She then met David Lelyveld in Hyderabad and soon married him. In 1979 the couple went to live and work in the United States. Alexander is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She has two children.

[edit] Books

Meena Alexander an internationally acclaimed poet and writer was born in Allahabad, India and raised in India and in Sudan. At the age of eighteen she went to England to continue her studies. She now lives and works in New York City where she is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Meena Alexander is probably best known for lyrical writing which deals sensitively with struggles of women and disenfranchised groups. Much of her work - which includes poetry, fiction, memoir, and a number of essays - is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer's subjectivity, the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders, and the theme of immigrant identity formation. Alexander’s œuvre also explores issues of home and dislocation, as a result of political unrest and especially war; the impact of multilingualism on literary production; the woman writer’s growing to feminist consciousness within a postcolonial, patriarchal society; questions of class and particularly the position of the poor and dispossessed in India and the United States; and Alexander’s personal, ongoing negotiation of a racialized, gendered experience of American life. Several of her more recent poems deal with the aftermath of 9/11.

Among her best known works are the volumes of poetry Illiterate Heart (2002) and Raw Silk (2004). Her new volume of poetry is Quickly Changing River (2008). She has also edited a volume of poems in the Everyman Series, Indian Love Poems (2005) and published a volume of essays and poems on the themes of migration and memory `The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience’ (2006) Her memoir Fault Lines (1993)was revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has published two novels Nampally Road (1991), and Manhattan Music (1997) and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism (1989). She has been the recipient of a numerous awards, including awards from the Fulbright and Rockefeller foundations. Fault Lines was chosen as a Best Book of 1993 by Publishers Weekly; Illiterate Heart won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Fault Lines is now widely included on university syllabi.

[edit] Poetry

Stone Roots(New Delhi, (1980)

House of a Thousand Doors (1988)

The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts (Short Work Series) (1989)

Night-Scene: The Garden (Short Work Series) (1992)

River and Bridge(1995/ 1996)

Illiterate Heart (2002)

Raw Silk (2004)

Quickly Changing River ( 2008)

[edit] Poetry and Essays

The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996)

[edit] Autobiography

  • Fault Lines (Autobiography 1993/ new expanded edition 2003)

[edit] Novels

  • Nampally Road (1991)
  • Manhattan Music (1997)

[edit] Criticism

  • Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, (1989)
  • The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism, (1979)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Guiyou Huang, ed., Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 2002)
  • Ruth Maxey, “An Interview With Meena Alexander”, The Kenyon Review 28.1 (Winter 2006), 187-194.
  • Ruth Maxey, “Interview: Meena Alexander”, MELUS 30.2 (Summer 2006), 21-39.