Elizabeth Alexander (born May 30, 1962) is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and a university professor.
Alexander was born in Harlem, New York City and grew up in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander, Jr. and Adele (Logan) Alexander, a teacher of African-American women’s history at George Washington University and writer. Her brother Mark was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a member of the president-elect’s transition team. She currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband Ficre who owns the Ethiopian restaurant named Cafe Adulis located on College Street near the Yale campus. They have two sons.
After she was born, the family moved to Washington, D.C. She was just a toddler when her parents brought her in March 1963 to the March on Washington, site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous I Have A Dream speech. Alexander recalled that “Politics was in the drinking water at my house”.
She began teaching at University of Chicago in 1991 as an assistant professor of English. Here she would first meet future president Barack Obama, who was a senior lecturer at the school’s law school from 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. While in Chicago in 1992, she won a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1996, she published a volume of poetry, Body of Life and a verse play, Diva Studies, which was staged at Yale University. She also became a founding faculty member of the Cave Canem workshop which helps develop African-American poets. In 1997, she received the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Later in that year, she moved to Massachusetts to teach at Smith College. She became the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence and the first director of the college’s Poetry Center.
In 2000, she returned to Yale University, where she would teach African-American studies and English. She also released her third poetry collection,Antebellum Dream Book. In 2005, she was selected in the first class of Alphonse Fletcher Foundation fellows and in 2007-08, she was an academic fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Since 2008, Alexander has chaired the African American Studies department at Yale. She currently teaches English language/literature, African-American literature and gender studies at Yale.
Alexander’s poems, short stories and critical writings have been widely published in such journals and periodicals such as: The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Village Voice, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Her play, Diva Studies, which was performed at the Yale School of Drama, garnered her aNational Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship as well as an Illinois Arts Council award.
Her 2005 volume of poetry, “American Sublime” was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize of that year. Alexander is also a scholar of African-American literature and cultureand recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior.
On January 20, 2009, at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, Alexander recited the poem “Praise Song for the Day”, which she composed for the occasion. She became only the fourth poet to read at an American presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993, and Miller Williams in 1997.
The announcement of her selection was favorably received by her fellow poets Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Paul Muldoon, and Jay Parini, who extolled her as “smart, deeply educated in the traditions of poetry, true to her roots, responsive to black culture. “The Poetry Foundation also hailed the choice, “Her selection affirms poetry’s central place in the soul of our country.”
According to research done by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America, it was revealed that, according to DNA analysis, she is a lineal cousin of another of the guests on the show, Stephen Colbert. Her paternal grandfather came to the United States in 1918 from Kingston, Jamaica. On the maternal side, her roots can be traced back thirty seven generations through notable ancestors including her 23rd great-grandmother Joan, Princess of England, 24th great-grandparents King John I of England and Clemence, Mistress of the King, and 37th great-grandfather Charlemagne, first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Praise Song for the Day
A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice. A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin. We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side. I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables. Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love? Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance. In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp, praise song for walking forward in that light.
Poem courtesy of Poets.org