Meena Alexander

  Educator, Writer

Indian poet, scholar, and writer Meena Alexander was born on February 17, 1951, in Allahabad, India and died on November 21, 2018.

She was raised in India and Sudan, Alexander resided and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Ph.D. program in English.

She depicted as `undoubtedly one of the best artists of contemporary occasions’ by The Statesman (India) was naturally introduced to a Syrian Christian family from Kerala, South India.

Alexander lived in Allahabad and Kerala until the point when she was very nearly five when her dad’s work—as a researcher for the Indian government—took the family to Khartoum in recently free Sudan.

Alexander went to the Unity High School there and subsequent to graduating in 1964, when she was just thirteen, Alexander selected in Khartoum University, where she examined English and French writing.

There she thought of her first sonnets, which were converted into Arabic and distributed in a nearby daily paper.

Subsequent to graduating with a Bachelor’s certificate Honors from Khartoum University in 1969, she moved to England and started doctoral examination at the University of Nottingham.

Alexander earned a Ph.D. in English in 1973 — at the age of twenty-two — with an exposition in Romantic writing that she would later create and distribute as The Poetic Self.

Alexander’s at that point moved to India and educated at a few colleges, including the University of Delhi and the University of Hyderabad.

During the five years she lived in India she distributed her initial three books of verse: The Bird’s Bright Ring (1976), I Root My Name (1977), and Without Place (1978).

In 1979 Alexander was a meeting individual at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

The next year she moved to New York City and turned into an associate educator at Fordham University, where she stayed until the point that 1987 when she turned into a partner teacher in the English Department at Hunter College, the City University of New York (CUNY).

Two years after the fact she joined the alumni staff of the Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

In 1992 Alexander was made full educator of English and Women’s Studies.

Alexander was designated Distinguished Professor of English in 1999 and keeps on educating in the PhD program at the Graduate Center and the MFA program at Hunter College.

Throughout the years she has likewise shown verse in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Since moving to New York, Alexander has been a productive writer, distributing six more volumes of verse, two books of artistic feedback, two books of verse expositions, two books, and a journal.

Alexander is hitched to David Lelyveld, the history specialist and sibling of columnist and creator Joseph Lelyveld, and has two youngsters.

The poems in her book, “Birthplace with Buried Stones”, “convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere”.

Of the poems in her book Atmospheric Embroidery A.E. Stallings writes: `Alexander’s language is precise, her syntax is pellucid, and her poems address all of the senses, offering a simultaneous richness and simplicity.’ And Vijay Seshadri writes: `The beautiful paradox of Meena Alexander’s art has always been found in the distillation of her epic human and spiritual experience into a pure and exquisite lyricism.

That paradox and that lyricism are on triumphant display in this book.’

Of her anthology Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing Simon Gikandi writes: 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 gone into the making of the most important literature of our time.’

Meena Alexander passed away at 67 years old.

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