Meena Alexander (born 17 February 1951) is a writer and an internationally acclaimed poet born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. She currently lives and works in New York City. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of literary criticism. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College as a part of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing and the CUNY Graduate Center.

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  • Meena Alexander (born 17 February 1951) is a writer and an internationally acclaimed poet born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. She currently lives and works in New York City. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of literary criticism. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College as a part of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing and the CUNY Graduate Center. Meena Alexander is probably best known for lyrical writing which deals sensitively with struggles of women and disenfranchised groups. Much of her work - which includes poetry, fiction, memoir, and a number of essays - is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer's subjectivity, the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders, and the theme of immigrant identity formation. Alexander’s œuvre also explores issues of home and dislocation, as a result of political unrest and especially war; the impact of multilingualism on literary production; the woman writer’s growing to feminist consciousness within a postcolonial, patriarchal society; questions of class and particularly the position of the poor and dispossessed in India and the United States; and Alexander’s personal, ongoing negotiation of a racialized, gendered experience of American life. Several of her more recent poems deal with the aftermath of 9/11. Among her best known works are the volumes of poetry Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004). Her new volume of poetry is Quickly Changing River (2008). She has also edited a volume of poems in the Everyman Series, Indian Love Poems (2005), and published a volume of essays and poems on the themes of migration and memory: `The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience’ (2006). Her memoir Fault Lines (1993) was chosen as one of Publisher's Weekly Best Books of 1993, and was revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has published two novels Nampally Road (1991), and Manhattan Music (1997) and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism (1989). She has been the recipient of a numerous awards, including awards from the Fulbright and Rockefeller foundations. Fault Lines was chosen as a Best Book of 1993 by Publishers Weekly; Illiterate Heart won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Fault Lines is now widely included on university syllabi. She is also a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Her new book, forthcoming in 2009, is called Poetics of Dislocation, from the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series.
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  • January 2008
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  • Meena Alexander (born 17 February 1951) is a writer and an internationally acclaimed poet born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. She currently lives and works in New York City. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays, and works of literary criticism. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College as a part of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing and the CUNY Graduate Center.
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  • Meena Alexander
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