EXTENDED
BIOGRAPHY
Meena
Alexander was born in India, raised there and in
Sudan. At eighteen she went to England to study. She
has a special interest in poetry and poetics; questions
of gender, migration and memory. She teaches in the
Ph.D. program in English at the Graduate Center and
the MFA program at Hunter College. She has a BA Honors
from Khartoum University in English and French and a
PhD from Nottingham University in English Studies. Her
scholarly work includes two books on English Romanticism;
her work in poetics includes a book of poems and essays The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial
Experience. Her volumes of poetry include Stone
Roots ; House of a Thousand Doors ; River and Bridge;
Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award); Raw Silk ; and two chapbooks, each a single long
poem: The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, and Night-Scene,
the Garden. Her collection Quickly Changing
River appeared in February 2008. She is the editor
of Indian Love Poems, and her most recent book, Poetics of Dislocation, was published in December, 2009. Her first poems were published
when she was a teenager in Sudan, in Arabic translation
and much of her work is concerned with migration and
its impact on the writer's subjectivity, and with the
sometimes violent events that compel people to cross
borders. |
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She
has read at Poetry International London, Struga Poetry
Evenings, Poetry Africa, Calabash Festival, Harbor Front
Festival, Poetry Society, India and other international
gatherings. She is the author of the memoir Fault
Lines (chosen by Publishers Weekly as one
of the best books of the year) and has published two
novels. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation,
Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council
of England, National Endowment for the Humanities, American
Council of Learned Societies, National Council for Research
on Women, New York State Council on the Arts, New York
Foundation for the Arts, Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation; she
was in residence at the MacDowell Colony and has held
the Martha Walsh Pulver residency for a poet at Yaddo.
She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne (Paris
IV); Frances Wayland Collegium Lecturer at Brown University;
Writer in Residence at the Center for American Culture
Studies at Columbia University; University Grants Commission
Fellow, Kerala University; Writer in Residence, National
University of Singapore; Poet in Residence at the University of Hyderabad. In 1998 she was a Member of
the Jury for the Neustadt International Award in Literature.
She has served as an Elector, American Poets Corner,
Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. She was the recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award in Literature from the South Asian Literary Association ( an organization allied to the Modern Languages Association) for contributions to American literature.
Published Works:
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)
Poetry and Essays:
The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996)
Poetics of Dislocation (University of Michigan Press, 2009)
Autobiography:
Fault Lines (1993/new expanded edition 2003)
Novels:
Nampally Road (1991)
Manhattan Music (1997)
Criticism:
Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989)
The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979)
Prefaces and Introductory Notes:
Foreword to Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library/Knopf, 2005)
'Buried Voices': Preface to Cast Me Out If You Will!: Stories and Memoir Pieces by Lalithambika Antherjanam (New York: Feminist Press, 1998)
'Bodily Inventions: A Note on the Poems' Guest Poetry Editor to 'The Body' -- Special Issue of The Asian Pacific American Journal vol.5 no.1, spring/summer 1996
'Translating Violence' Foreword to Blood into Ink, Twentieth Century South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War, eds. Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns ( Boulder: Westview Press, Spring l994)
Introduction to Truth Tales : Stories by Contemporary Indian Women Writers (New York: Feminist Press, Fall 1990) Editors Choice of Publisher's Weekly, 1990
Edited Works:
Indian Love Poems (2005)
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