Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, on February 17, 1951, the eldest of three children. She moved to Sudan when she was five, and attended school in Khartoum. She was a precocious child, learning to read early and publishing her poetry (in Arabic translation) at age fifteen in Sudanese newspapers. She went to England for higher education and later returned to India to teach in Delhi and later Hyderabad. She moved to New York in 1979, married, pregnant, and with a job as assistant professor of English at Fordham University. Her nomadic life also involved speaking in many tongues -- her native Malayalam, English, the Arabic of Khartoum, Hindi and French. She has written several books of poetry, a book of memoirs, and novels, and literary criticism, and has been published in many anthologies of poetry and prose.. Her latest novel, Manhattan Music, is about an immigrant Indian woman in New York.

As a writer, she is particularly interested in "fault lines," the areas of fracture between one cultural tradition and another.

She teaches in the writing program at Columbia University, and lives in New York with her husband and two children. In 1999 she was awarded a distinguished professorship by the City University of New York.

About Meena Alexander

More about her at Emory U.'s postcolonial studies web site.

Alexander named Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College. Feb 2000.

Western Experiences: Education and "Third World Women" in the Fictions of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena Alexander. by Rahul Krishna Gairola.

Poetry

Between the Lines: Asian American Women's Poetry. A videotape which includes Meena Alexander, among other poets. Available from Women Make Movies.

Articles

Leela and Flora, a short story in Indiaworld.

Bibliography



Raw Silk
Northwestern University Press (2004)

From her cross-cultural perspective, Alexander writes with moving intensity of post-September 11 events as she evokes violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope. This autobiographical cycle of poems reflects the surrealism of such a life, and is shot through with the frissons of pleasure and pain, of beauty and tension, that mark a truly global identity.

Sawnet Review by Nalini Iyer

9/11 poems from Raw Silk

Illiterate Heart
Northwestern University Press. (2003)

Sawnet Review by Rabea Murtaza

Illiterate Heart: The Movement Toward Self Definition by Maureen Ruprecht Fadem in Jouvert.

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



The Shock of Arrival
South End Press, Boston. . (1996)

Sawnet Review by Aiko Joshi

River and Bridge
TSAR Press, Toronto/Rupa, New Delhi. . (1995)

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

Night-scene, the garden
Red Dust, New York. (1992)

Night-scene, the garden
Mercury House, San Francisco. . (1991)

I Root My Name
United Writers Selling Agents, Calcutta. (1989)

Women in Romanticism
Barnes & Noble, Md. . (1989)

House of a Thousand Doors
Three Continents Press, Washington DC. (1988)

The Poetic Self
Humanities Press, N.J. (1980)

Stone Roots
Arnold Heinemann, New Delhi. (1980)

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

South Asian Women authors
Sawnet Bookshelf
Sawnet