Acclaimed poet and novelist, Prof. Meena Alexander dies at 67

New York: Acclaimed poet poet, essayist, and novelist Prof. Meena Alexander dies at 67.
Alexander was considered one of the foremost poets of her time. Her collections of poetry include Atmospheric Embroidery, Birthplace with Buried Stones, Quickly Changing River, Raw Silk, and Illiterate Heart, which won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Harvard Review among other journals.

She published two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music.
In 2014, Alexander was named a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla.

She was a Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York.

She is married to David Lelyveld, the historian and brother of journalist and author Joseph Lelyveld, and has two children.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop expressed their condolence with a verse from her poem Krishna: ‘The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do mine. Memory is all you have.’
Her autobiography Fault Lines (1993) received international acclaim. It was revised in 2003.

She was described as `undoubtedly one of the finest poets of contemporary times’ by The Statesman (India)
She was born into a Syrian Christian family from Kottayam. She lived in Allahabad and Kerala until she was almost five when her father's work—as a scientist for the Indian government—took the family to Khartoum in newly independent Sudan.
When she was only thirteen, Alexander was enrolled in Khartoum University, where she studied English and French literature. There she wrote her first poems, which were translated into Arabic and published in a local newspaper.

After graduating with a Bachelor's degree Honors from Khartoum University in 1969, she moved to England and began doctoral study at the University of Nottingham. She earned a PhD in English in 1973 — at the age of twenty-two — with a dissertation in Romantic literature that she would later develop and publish as The Poetic Self.

She then moved to India and taught at several universities, including the University of Delhi and the University of Hyderabad. During the five years she lived in India she published her first three books of poetry: The Bird's Bright Ring (1976), I Root My Name (1977), and Without Place(1978).

In 1979 she was a visiting fellow at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. The following year she moved to New York City and became an assistant professor at Fordham University, where she remained until 1987 when she became an assistant professor in the English Department at Hunter College, the City University of New York (CUNY).

Two years later she joined the graduate faculty of the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. In 1992 she was made full professor of English and Women's Studies. She was appointed Distinguished Professor of English in 1999 and continued to teach in the PhD program at the Graduate Center and the MFA program at Hunter College. Over the years she has also taught poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Since moving to New York, Alexander has been a prolific author, publishing six more volumes of poetry, two books of literary criticism, two books of lyric essays, two novels, and a memoir.

Alexander is known for lyric poetry that deals with migration, its impact on the subjectivity of the writer, and the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders.
About her work, Maxine Hong Kingston has said: ‘Meena Alexander sings of countries, foreign and familiar, places where the heart and spirit live, and places for which one needs a passport and visas. Her voice guides us far away and back home. The reader sees her visions and remembers and is uplifted.’

Alexander has been influenced and mentored by the Indian poets Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das, as well as the American poets Adrienne Rich and Galway Kinnell.

COMPLETE LIST OF PUBLISHED WORKS
Poetry:
Atmospheric Embroidery (2018)
Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013)
Quickly Changing River (2008)
Raw Silk (2004)
Illiterate Heart (2002)
River and Bridge (1995/ 1996)
Stone Roots (New Delhi, (1980)
House of a Thousand Doors (1988)
Poetry Chapbooks
Dreaming in Shimla: Letter to my Mother (2015)
Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems (2012)
Shimla (2012)
Otto Poesie (2011)
Night-Scene: The Garden (Short Work Series) (1992)
The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts (Short Work Series) (1989)
Early Works
I Root My Name (poems) (Calcutta: United Writers, 1977)
Without Place (long poem) (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1977)
In the Middle Earth (performance piece)(New Delhi: Enact, 1977).
The Bird’s Bright Ring (long poem) (1976)
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)
Name me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing (2018)