AN INTERVIEW WITH MEENA ALEXANDER in the Kenyon Review

By Ruth Maxey

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. She now lives in New York City, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her eight volumes of poetry include the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004).

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, while a number of her recent poems, such as “Late, There Was an Island” and “Triptych in a Time of War,” deal with the aftermath of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.

Alexander has produced the acclaimed autobiography Fault Lines (1993), chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). She is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a volume of notes and essays on poetry, migration, and memory.

This interview took place at the Graduate Center, City University of New York on February 25 and 28, 2005. [read the full interview]

Other interviews and articles:
Fragile Places: A Poet's Notebook (pdf)
The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander by Lopamudra Basu (pdf)
In the Mercy of Time -- Flute Music: an interview with Meena Alexander by Daniela Gioseffi (pdf)
Conversation: Salma (Tamil Poet) and Meena Alexander at the Chennai Poetry Festival, January 2009
Profile of Meena Alexander on the Poetry International website
Interview with The Writer Magazine (2009)
`Lifting the Cup/ Crossing the Border of Maternity, Conversation on the Poetics of Meena Alexander’ by Leah Souffrant (2009) (pdf)

Poems:

• Desire: A Poem Cycle
  
• Noctural with Ghostly Landscape on St. Lucy’s Day (In Memory of Grace Paley) (pdf)
  
• Letters to Gandhi: A Poem Cycle
  
• Listening to Lorca, and other poem
• Poems from River and Bridge
  
• Poems from Illiterate Heart
  
• Poems from Raw Silk
  
• Poems from Quickly Changing River
  
• Poems, New Uncollected