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.

Works

• The God of Small Things
• The Greater Common Good and The End of Imagination
• The Algebra of Infinite Justice
• An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire