Meena Alexander

Writer

• Born: February 17, 1951
• Place of Birth: Allahabad, India
• Died: November 21, 2018
• Place of Death: New York, New York

Meena Alexander was a writer and academic best known for her poetry, which often explores issues of identity, immigration, and sense of place.

Author Profile

Meena Alexander was born on February 17, 1957. She spent her early life in Kerala, India, a state at the southwestern tip of the country, and also in Sudan. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1969 from the University of Khartoum and a PhD from the University of Nottingham in 1973. After teaching at universities in Delhi and Hyderabad, she moved to New York City in 1979, where she served as a distinguished professor of English and women's studies and taught in the PhD program in English at various City University of New York's (CUNY) schools.

After publishing early works in India in the 1970s, Alexander gained substantial recognition as a poet after moving to the US. Many of her poems were published in literary magazines such as Prairie Schooner. Some of her best-known collections include Stone Roots (1980) and House of a Thousand Doors (1988). She also expanded her scope with novels, drama, literary criticism, and an autobiography. Her memoir Fault Lines (1993) was picked as one of Publishers Weekly's best books of the year and remains one of her most widely praised works. Her poetry book Illiterate Heart won the PEN Open Book Award in 2002.

Alexander continued to write and publish into the 2010s, earning considerable acclaim. She held several residencies and fellowships over the years. In 2014 she was named a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, and in 2016 she served as a poet in residence in Venice. She published her last poetry collection, Atmospheric Embroidery, in 2018. The collection In Praise of Fragments, combining poems and other pieces, was released posthumously in 2020.

Alexander described herself as a “woman cracked by multiple migrations,” acted on by the disparate and powerful influences of the languages and customs of the four continents on which she lived. Although her works are written in English, she grew up speaking Malayalam, a Dravidian language of southwest India, and Arabic, the language of her Syrian Christian heritage, spoken in North Africa. Her writing reflects the tension created by the interplay of these influences and serves as a way to derive meaning from her wide range of experience.

Perhaps the most prominent theme of Alexander’s work is the challenges presented by being a woman, of having a woman’s body, and coping with the societal, physiological, and personal pressures on and responses to that body as it develops through childhood into maturity and middle age, as in her book of poems Quickly Changing River (2008). Her grandmothers serve as mythical figures with whom Alexander closely identified. Her perspective was further complicated by her alienation from the language and culture of her childhood and by her need to recover something of that past. The images of fecundity and beauty with which Alexander’s work is suffused derive from her youth in Kerala, India; these images may be juxtaposed with images of infirmity, sterility, or brutality, underscoring the writer’s need to integrate the fragmented components of her life as an expatriate. One of Alexander’s later works is another book of poems, Birthplace with Buried Stones (2013), which conveys the fragmented experience of the traveler. The poems range from time and place, from Alexander's native India to New York City and evoke images from the landscapes she has seen.

The imagination provides a synthesis of the elements of history and personality in Alexander’s work. Her poems “begin as a disturbance, a jostling in the soul” which prompted her to write, seeking “that fortuitous, fleeting meaning, so precious, so scanty.”

Alexander received numerous awards throughout her career, including from the Fulbright Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. On November 21, 2018, Alexander died from endometrial serous cancer.

Bibliography

Dave, Shilpa. “The Doors to Home and History: Post-Colonial Identities in Meena Alexander and Bharati Mukherjee.” Amerasia Journal 19 (Fall, 1993): 103.

Rev. of Fault Lines: A Memoir, by Meena Alexander. Publishers Weekly. PWxyz, 1 Mar. 2000. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Meena Alexander, Poet Who Wrote of Dislocation, Dies at 67." The New York Times, 26 Nov. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/obituaries/meena-alexander-dead.html. Accessed 3 Jan. 2019.

"Meena Alexander." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/meena-alexander. Accessed 13 June 2024.

"Meena Alexander." Poets.org, poets.org/poet/meena-alexander. Accessed 13 June 2024.

Perry, John Oliver. Review of Nampally Road, by Meena Alexander. World Literature Today 65 (Spring, 1991): 364.