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Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012 4:30 p.m.
Meena Alexander considered one of the foremost Indian poets of her generation, was born in India and raised both there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to England to study. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry: The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, Night-Scene, the Garden and in 2012 Shimla. Her poems have been translated into several languages including French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Macedonian, Arabic, Malayalam and Hindi.
She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of the volume of poems and short prose pieces: The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Her memoir Fault Lines was picked as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the year. Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her prose includes two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music and two academic studies on early English Romanticism, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.
Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Council of England as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been in residence at the McDowell Colony and at Yaddo where she had the Martha Walsh Pulver Fellowship for a Poet.