Elizabeth Alexander

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. Elizabeth Alexander is considered one of the country's most gifted contemporary poets, and the publication of her essays in The Black Interior in 2004 established her as an astute critic and cultural commentator as well. Arnold Rampersad has called Alexander "one of the brightest stars in our literary sky . . . a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene." In this new collection of her essays, reviews, and interviews, Alexander again focuses on African American artistic production, particularly poetry, and the cultural contexts in which it is created and experienced. The book's first section, "Black Arts 101," takes up the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove (among others); artist Romare Bearden; dancer Bill T. Jones; and dramatist August Wilson. A second section, "Black Feminist Thinking," provides engaging meditations ranging from "My Grandmother's Hair" and "A Very Short History of Black Women and Food" to essays on the legacies of Toni Cade, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan. The collection's final section, "Talking," includes interviews, a commencement address---"Black Graduation"---and the essay "Africa and the World." Elizabeth Alexander received a B. A. from Yale University, an M. A. from Boston University, and a Ph. D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She has published four books of poems: The Venus Hottentot (1990); Body of Life (1996); Antebellum Dream Book (2001); and, most recently, American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her play, Diva Studies, was produced at the Yale School of Drama. She is presently Professor of American and African American Studies at Yale University.

Elizabeth Alexander is a leading American poet whose work has been inspired by a wide range of influence, from history, literature, art and music to the 'rich infinity' of the African-American experience. Her's is a vital and vivid poetic voice on race, gender, politics and motherhood. "American Blue" is her first British publication. Many of her poems bring history alive and singing into the present in highly musical, sharply contemporary narratives, which use many different forms and voices to cover subjects ranging from slave rebellions, the Civil Rights movement, Muhammed Ali and Toni Morrison to the lives of jazz musicians and the 'Venus Hottentot', a 19th-century African woman exhibited at carnivals.

A fourth collection of poems by the author recalls a century and a half of African-American traditions, knitting together a fascinating blend of history, biography, personal experience, pop culture, and dreamscape. Original.

Legendary poet Elizabeth Alexander turns her finely-honed sensibilities to the subject of blackness and the interior world of the modern African-American. Intelligent, perceptive and keenly observed, this collection of essays traces a thoughtful path through music, poetry and the outstanding social issues of the last 200 years to synthesise a remarkable picture of the modern African-American psyche. From Langston Hughes to the Rodney King video, Alexander leads her reader effortlessly over the complex terrain of art and politics to a new vision of the black interior.

In surprising turns through different American cities, mindsets, and eras, and through the strange rhythms of dreaming, the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander composes her own kind of improvisational jazz. Antebellum Dream Book offers a music of resistances as well as soaring flights of fancy: the conflicts of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and after; a mother's struggle to see through a postpartum fog; a vision in which the poet takes on the narrative voice of Muhammad Ali. The New York Times Book Review has said that Alexander creates intellectual magic in poem after poem. In this stunning collection, she furthers her reputation as a vital and vivid poetic voice keenly attuned to our ideas of race, gender, politics, and motherhood.

Tia Chucha Press is proud to reprint Elizabeth Alexander's ""Body of Life,"" first published in 1996 and a collection that stands as a testament to the well-wrought line with the deeply threaded elements of history, ancestors, jazz, and family that mark the rare power inherent in Ms. Alexander's work. Her selection as the inaugural poet for 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama is well deserved - she is one of the most fresh and vital voices in American literature today.