Meena Alexander was a distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She had a special interest in the areas of poetry, transnational and Asian American poetics, gender, migration and memory. She was born in India and raised there and in Sudan, at eighteen she went to England to study She had a BA Honors from Khartoum University in English and French and a Ph.D in English Studies from Nottingham University.

Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and Francis Wayland Collegium Lecturer at Brown University. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and held the Martha Walsh Pulver residency for a poet at Yaddo.

In addition to three earlier volumes of poetry published in her twenties when she was in India, she had several volumes of poetry including the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004) and Quickly Changing River (2008). She was the editor of Indian Love Poems (2005) published by the Everyman’s Series. Alexander produced the 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 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, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). Her reflections on poetry, migration and memory Poetics of Dislocation appears in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. More recent poetry collections included Birthplace With Buried Stones in 2013 and Atmospheric Embroidery, published in 2018. 

A book of essays on her work Passage to Manhattan: Essays on Meena Alexander (eds. Lopamudra Basu and Cynthia Leenerts) appears in 2009 from the Cambridge Scholars Press, UK.

www.meenaalexander.com