landmark's poetry with prakriti

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. She now lives in New York City, where she is University Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

Her volumes of poetry include the collections, *Illiterate Heart* (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award, *Raw Silk* (2004) and Quickly Changing River (2008). She is the editor of *Indian Love Poems *(2005). Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer's subjectivity, and with the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders. In 2002 after meeting the survivors of violence in the relief camps in Gujarat , she composed a cycle of poems entitled “Letters to Gandhi”.

Alexander has produced the autobiography, *Fault Lines *(1993), chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has also published two novels, *Nampally Road* (1991) and *Manhattan Music* (1997); a book of poems and essays, *The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience* (1996); and two academic studies, one of which is *Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley* (1989). Her book of reflections on poetry, migration and memory *Poetics of Dislocation* is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series.

She has read at Poetry International London; Struga Poetry Evenings ; Poetry Africa, Durban; Calabash Festival, Jamaica, Harbor Front Festival, Toronto; Sahitya Akademi, India and other international gatherings. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, National Council for Research on Women, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation; she was in residence at the MacDowell Colony and has held the Martha Walsh Pulver residency for a poet at Yaddo. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Sorbonne (Paris IV); Frances Wayland Collegium Lecturer at Brown University; Writer in Residence at the Center for American Culture Studies at Columbia University; University Grants Commission Fellow, Kerala University; Writer in Residence, National University of Singapore. In 1998 she was a Member of the Jury for the Neustadt International Award in Literature. She has been named an Elector, American Poets Corner, Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.