Elizabeth Alexander

Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation president since 2018. Previously she was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation. She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016 as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Alexander was born in Harlem, New York City, and grew up in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander, Jr. and Adele Logan Alexander, a professor of African-American women's history at George Washington University and writer.  Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a president-elect's transition team member.

After she was born, the family moved to Washington, D.C. She was just a toddler when her parents took her in August 1963 to the March on Washington site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Alexander recalled, "Politics was in the drinking water at my house." She also took ballet as a child.

She was educated at Sidwell Friends School and graduated in 1980. She went to Yale University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1984. She studied poetry at Boston University under Derek Walcott and got her Master's in 1987. Her mother said, "That poet you love, Derek Walcott, is teaching at Boston University. Why don't you apply?" Alexander originally entered studying fiction writing, but Walcott looked at her diary and saw the poetry potential. Alexander said, "He gave me a huge gift. He took a cluster of words and lineated it. And I saw it."

In 1992, she received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. While finishing her degree, she taught at nearby Haverford College from 1990 to 1991. At this time, she would publish her first work, The Venus Hottentot. The title comes from Sarah Baartman, a 19th-century South African woman of the Khoikhoi ethnic group. Alexander is an alumna of the Ragdale Foundation.

Alexander's poems, short stories, and critical writings have been widely published in journals and periodicals such as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Village Voice, The Women's Review of Books, and The Washington Post. In addition, her play Diva Studies, performed at the Yale School of Drama, garnered her a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council award.

Her 2005 volume of poetry, American Sublime, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize of that year. Alexander is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior. In addition, Alexander received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry in 2010.