RIP Meena Alexander (1951–2018)

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Meena Alexander, who died on November 21st in New York. At India Abroad, Suman Guha Mozumder remarks on Alexander's literary stature, as an admired and respected member of both the US and Indian poetry communities, and with her death "touching off a wave of grief that swept across literary fields in both the United States and India." More from there:

She was an “exceptional person in every way,” said acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh, posting on Twitter after hearing news of her death. “As a poet and a human being. I will miss her,” Ghosh said about Alexander who was also a Distinguished Professor of English in the PhD program at the Graduate Center in Hunter College, City University of New York.

Alexander, 67, who described herself as woman “cracked by multiple migrations” was born in Allahabad and raised in Kerala and Sudan. She called herself “homeless as well as at home” in multiple places at the same time.

“Meena Alexander was one of a kind. Her accomplishment in poetry was barely seen in the U.S. the way it was seen globally and maybe that is because Meena's poetics and aesthetics are better understood in the context of Indian and Sudanese-African poetry, the two landscapes of her childhood and where she learned English as a language,” poet and writer Kazim Ali, told India Abroad. Ali is the editor of New York-based Nightboat Books, an American nonprofit literary press he founded in 2003. Ali, born to Indian parents the United Kingdom, worked closely with Alexander recently on a poetry book slated for publication next year.

Ali noted that Alexander has written extensively about the violent nature of her introduction to English in both poetry and essays.“It seems this may have led her to her doctoral studies which were on revolutionary writers in the canon of English literature like Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley and wife of social thinker William Godwin, whose own novels and essays presage modern feminism by a hundred years or more, as well as Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William Wordsworth,” Ali said.

In September of this year, Alexander spoke with our PoetryNow producers about her transnational upbringing and shared her poem "Where Do You Come From?," which recounts her voyage from India to Sudan as a young girl. Please celebrate Alexander's life and work with a selection of her poetry featured here.