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Elizabeth Alexander (born May 30, 1962) [1] is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. Previously, Alexander was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department.
Elizabeth Alexander’s careful, precise poetry and her awareness of history, especially African American history, as well as her personal friendship with the Obamas, made her a natural choice as President Obama’s inaugural poet. Alexander became only the fourth poet ever asked to read at a presidential inauguration, and her poem, “Praise ...
Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. She is also is president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities.
Elizabeth Alexander - Elizabeth Alexander was born in 1962 in Harlem, New York, and grew up in Washington, D.C. She currently serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Elizabeth Alexander is perhaps most famous for reading her poem, “Praise Song for the Day” at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Have your students research and think about the civic uses of poetry in the United States.
In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 and following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Elizabeth Alexander—one of the great literary voices of our time—turned a mother’s eye to her sons’ and students’ generation and wrote a celebrated and moving reflection on the challenges facing young Black ...
Ars Poetica #100: I Believe. By Elizabeth Alexander. Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry. is where we are ourselves. (though Sterling Brown said. “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”), digging in the clam flats.
