Alexander, Meena 1951-

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ALEXANDER, Meena 1951-

PERSONAL: Born February 17, 1951, in Allahabad, India; immigrated to the United States, 1979; naturalized U.S. citizen; daughter of George (a scientist and diplomat) and Mary Alexander; married David Lelyveld; children: Adam Kuruvilla, Svati Mariam. Education: University of Khartoum, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1969; University of Nottingham, Ph.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Hunter College, City University of New York, 695 Park Ave., New York, NY 10021. Agent—Ellen Geiger, Frances Goldin Literary Agency, 57 E. 11th St., Ste. 5B, New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, lecturer, and professor. University of Khartoum, Khartoum, Sudan, tutor in English, 1969; University of Delhi, Delhi, India, lecturer in English, 1974; Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, lecturer in English and French, 1975; Central Institute of English and Foreign Language, Hyderabad, India, lecturer in English, 1975–77; University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, lecturer, 1977–79, reader in English, 1979; Sorbonne, Paris, visiting fellow, 1979; Fordham University, Bronx, NY, assistant professor of English, 1980–87; Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY, assistant professor, 1987–89, associate professor, 1989–91, professor of English, beginning 1992, distinguished professor of English, 1999; Columbia University, New York, NY, lecturer in writing program, beginning 1990. Lecturer at University of Stirling, 1973, and Osmania University, 1978; visiting fellow at Centre de Recherches en Litterature et Civilization Nord-Americaines, Sorbonne, University of Paris, autumn, 1979; visiting assistant professor at University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, summer, 1981; writer-in-residence at Center for American Culture Studies, Columbia University, 1988; MacDowell Colony fellow, 1993, 1998; poet-in-residence, American College, Madurai, India, 1994; international writer-in-residence, Arts Council of England 1995; artist/humanist-in-residence, Intercultural Resource Center, Columbia University, 1995; Lila Wallace Writer-in-Residence, Minnesota Asian American Renaissance, 1995; member of the jury, Fifteenth Neustadt International Award in Literature, 1997–98.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association, PEN American Center.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities travel grant, 1985; New York State Council for the Arts grant, 1988; Poetry Award, New York State Foundation for the Arts, 1999; PEN Open Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Foundation, 2002, for Illiterate Heart; Imbongi Yesizwe Poetry International Award, 2002; Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, 2002; Bellagio Award, Rockefeller Foundation, 2003; Arts Council of England Award, American Council of Learned Societies Award; Lila Wallace Foundation Award; Altrusa International Foundation Award; National Council for Research on Women Award; New York State Council on the Arts Award.

WRITINGS:

POETRY COLLECTIONS

The Bird's Bright Ring, Writers Workshop (Calcutta, India), 1976.

Without Place, Writers Workshop (Calcutta, India), 1977.

I Root My Name, United Writers (Calcutta, India), 1977.

Stone Roots, Arnold-Heinemann (New Delhi, India), 1980.

House of a Thousand Doors (poetry and prose), Three Continents (Washington, DC), 1989.

The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, Red Dust (New York, NY), 1989.

Night-Scene: The Garden, Red Dust (New York, NY), 1992.

River and Bridge, Rupa (New Delhi, India), 1995.

The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (poetry and prose), South End Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

Illiterate Heart: Where Translations Perish, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 2002.

Raw Silk, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 2004.

(Editor and selector) Indian Love Poems, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

In the Middle Earth (plays), Enact (New Delhi, India), 1977.

The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (criticism), Arnold-Heinemann (London, England), 1979, Humanities Press (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), 1981.

Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (criticism), Macmillan (New York, NY), 1989.

Nampally Road (novel), Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1991.

Fault Lines: A Memoir, preface by Ngūgī wa Thiongó, Feminist Press (New York, NY), 1992, revised and expanded edition, Feminist Press at the City University of New York (New York, NY), 2003.

Manhattan Music (novel), Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Poet, novelist, teacher, scholar, and memoirist Meena Alexander draws from her international experiences growing up in India and the Sudan, being educated in England, and finally moving to the United States. As a result, her work exhibits the influences of a multilingual and multicultural background. Her early poetry, characterized by Aruna Srivastava in Contemporary Women Poets as "a highly Imagistic poetry" which is marked by a tension between "different traditions of poetry, history, myth, and language," falls largely into two periods. The first period encompasses the poems published in India, including The Bird's Bright Ring which explores the consequences of British rule in India, and House of a Thousand Doors, her first book published in the United States. Of the latter book, Alexander told Srivastava that she thinks of it "as a beginning" because of its "sense of newness, of the persistent difficulty of another landscape, another life, becomes in those poems part of a search for a precarious truth." Here, Alexander develops the grandmother figures who serve as bridges between generations, time, and cultures.

The second period begins with The Storm and continues through Night-Scene: The Garden, poems that Alexander told Srivastava "form part of a poetic autobiography." In this second period, Alexander's poetry also becomes more fervently feminist, expanding upon the grandmother images to include mother-daughter relationships as well, and offering her own persona as a voice for the mute and disempowered: "Women of Delhi / You do not see how centuries of dream are flowing from your land / And so I sing knowing poetry to be like bread." Yet Alexander sees herself also as spokesperson for the disassociated and the displaced, trying to connect the fragmentation of the late-twentieth century into a workable whole in which the "bitten self cast back / into its intimate wreckage" will eventually discover itself to be "poised, apart, particular / lovely and rare."

Alexander's memoir Fault Lines drew great critical acclaim when it was published. The author once told CA: "In Fault Lines, I move back and forth between India, the Sudan, and New York City. I have lived in the city since 1979 and it provides the framework within which I remember, within which I write, fabricate, make fictive worlds." As a result, as Lisa Nussbaum noted in Library Journal, the book crosses over the "fault lines" that are created by "the shifting ground of loyalties and identities" that develop from living on different continents and in different cultures. Yet, Alexander "draws continuously on the silken threads that make up who she is and how she sees the world." Alexander recounts the difficulties in discovering a consistency of voice and theme from her diverse cultural experiences, though what emerges is a voice that Belles Lettres contributor Lauren Glen Dunlap called "a treasure."

In Fault Lines, Alexander writes of how "Multiple birth dates ripple, sing inside me, as if a long stretch of silk were passing though my fingers," and of how "As I make up a katha, a story of my life, the lives before me, around me, weave into a net without which I would drop ceaselessly." The image of the threads woven into a net, of multicultural experiences woven into a sustaining and sustainable life, offer readers, as Susheela N. Rao writing in World Literature Today noted, "an excellent record of a sensitive young Indian woman writer whose poetic expression is the consummate product of colorful experiences with many cultures and countries."

In 2003 Alexander published a revised edition of Fault Lines, which contains a new chapter, "Lyric in a Time of Violence." This chapter was written after the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, an event that also figured into her poetry. In addition, her life in the United States greatly influenced several collections published in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The prose and poetry pieces of The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience discuss moving to the United States as an immigrant and living there as a woman of color; the author also offers an analysis of influential Indian women writers. Alexander contrasts her feeling of displacement with the discovery of her own literary voice. In Journal of American Ethnic History, Prem Poddar stated, "Alexander's book offers its invaluable analysis from the point of view of the female Other entering America."

Alexander continues on this autobiographical bent in two collections of poetry: Illiterate Heart: Where Translations Perish and Raw Silk. In the former, the poet explores who she is, especially how she relates to nature, and the languages of her life. Taking the perspective of a New Yorker, the events of September 11 and its aftermath inform Raw Silk. The collection features poems about Alexander's life as a woman and immigrant, based on what she saw and experienced in the city. The poet also links the events of September 11 to violence worldwide. Calling the poems "sensuous, evocative, poignant, lyrical," Nalini Iyer observed in Sawnet: "If Alexander's poetry is about memory, then this collection is both a memorial to those who die in violence as it is a chronicling of that violence so that we never repeat it again."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Alexander, Meena, The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, Red Dust (New York, NY), 1989.

Alexander, Meena, Night-Scene: The Garden, Red Dust (New York, NY), 1992.

Alexander, Meena, Fault Lines: A Memoir, Feminist Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Reworlding: Writers of the Indian Diaspora, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, January, 2003, Zoe Randall, "Migration, Catholicism, and the Autobiographical Lyric," review of Illiterate Heart: Where Translations Perish, p. 26; May-June, 2005, Lee Bellavance, "The Raw Silk Route," review of Raw Silk, p. 25.

Belles Lettres, summer, 1993, Lauren Glen Dunlap, review of Fault Lines, p. 43.

Harvard Review, volume 28, 2005, Jacquelyn Pope, review of Raw Silk, pp. 166-167.

Journal of American Ethnic History, summer, 1999, Prem Poddar, review of The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, p. 176.

Library Journal, March 1, 1993, Lisa Nussbaum, review of Fault Lines, p. 86; August, 2004, Doris Lynch, review of Raw Silk, p. 84.

MELUS, winter, 1999, Bindu Malieckal, review of The Shock of Arrival, p. 192.

Rain Taxi Review of Books, winter, 2004/2005, Daniela Gioseffi, "Flow of Air, Pulse of Water, Breath of Fire: An Interview with Meena Alexander."

Social Text, September, 2002, Lopamudra Basu, "Lyric Poem in a Time of Violence: A Conversation with Meena Alexander."

Women's Review of Books, July, 2002, Prageeta Sharm, review of Illiterate Heart, p. 9.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1994, Susheela N. Rao, review of Fault Lines, p. 883; winter, 1999, Erika Duncan, "A Portrait of Meena Alexander," interview with and profile of Meena Alexander, p. 23.