• Bio:

    Meena Alexander taught at Hunter and the Graduate Center for some 30 years and was a member of the Human Rights Faculty. As a practicing poet, and scholar, she had a special interest in postcolonial writings (Anglophone and Francophone) and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her broad range of research interests included autobiographical writing, global feminism, Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms, South Asian literature and feminism, transnational migration, trauma, memory and identity. Her many awards and achievements include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundations and the Arts Council of England. She has also received the PEN Open Book Award and the Imbongi Yesizwe International Poetry Award from South Africa. In 2011, she was Poet-in-Residence at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, and took part in the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest).

    Publications include:

    • Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2018)
    • Name me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing (Yale University Press, 2018)
    • ‘Phenomenology of Passage’ PMLA (special issue on `Literature in the World’) Fall 2016
    • Debt, Special issue of WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly) co-edited with Rosalind Petchesky, Published, May 2014
    • Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2013)
    • ‘What Use is Poetry?’ (Address to the Yale Political Union, April 23, 2013) published in World Literature Today, September/October 2013
    • Poetics of Dislocation(University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry series, 2009).
    • The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (Boston: Southend Press, 1996).
    • Fault Lines (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1993; Penguin India, 1994). Publishers Weekly Best Books of 1993; new expanded edition with preface by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 2003.
    • Illiterate Heart (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2002). Winner of the PEN Open Book Award.