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Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, raised there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to study in England. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and the Ph.D.Program at the Graduate Center.

Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger

Meena Alexander's poetry has been widely published and anthologised. She is the author of six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River as well as two chapbooks. She is the editor of the Everyman Library's Indian Love Poems. She has written the acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines (picked by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year) as well as two novels, one of which is Nampally Road (A VLS Editor's choice). She has published a volume of poems and essays The Shock of Arrival . A book of essays and notes entitled Poetics of Dislocation appeared in the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series. She has two academic studies , one of which is Women in Romanticism. A book of essays on her work has recently appeared: Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander (eds Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

She has read at Poetry International London, Rome Poetry Festival, Struga Poetry Evenings, Poetry Africa, Calabash Festival, Harbor Front Festival, Sahitya Akademi, India and other international gatherings. She has received awards from the John Simon 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 has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony and has held the Martha Walsh Pulver residency for a poet at Yaddo. She was 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, Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She has served as a Member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Award in Literature and 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)
Otto Poesie (2011)*
Shimla (2012)*

*Chapbooks

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)

Links:

Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander (edited by Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)

Click here to read the first Chapter

Poetry Society of America

Academy of American Poets

Encyclopedia Britannica

Voices from the Gaps biography

Sawnet Bookshelf biography

BBC World Service biography

The Scholar and Feminist Online

Kenyon Review

Meena Alexander page, from the Emory University Postcolonial Studies website

Meena Alexander faculty profile, from the Ph.D. Program in English, CUNY Graduate Center

Ars Interperes

Contact Information:

Email Meena Alexander at malexander@gc.cuny.edu.