Monday, March 5, 2012

Elizabeth Alexander Week

This week, I'll devote blog entries to the work of Elizabeth Alexander, a writer and scholar who has had an increasingly important presence in the discourse on African American poetry over the last 20 years. Her poem "The Venus Hottentot," her focus on history in various works, and her creative approaches to exploring a range of ideas related to popular culture in her poems have helped establish her as one of our leading poets.

I've devoted weeks to works by Allison Joseph, Evie Shockley, and Margaret Walker, so it's certainly time for me to provide a series of writings on Alexander's work.

Her books of poetry include: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), American Blue: Selected Poems (2006), Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, with Marilyn Nelson (2007), Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon (2008), Praise Song for the Day (2009), and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010).

Her books of essays include Power and Possibility: Essays, Interviews, Reviews (2007) and The Black Interior (2003). She has served as the editor of Love’s Instruments: Poems by Melvin Dixon (1995) and The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2005).  

Entries:
• March 10: Elizabeth Alexander's Books
• March 9: Elizabeth Alexander: At the Crossroads of Poetry & Black Studies
• March 8: Elizabeth Alexander, Twitter Poetics & White Space
• March 7: Elizabeth Alexander's Teeny Tiny Twitter Poems
• March 6:  The Trouble with Anthologies & the Series Trend in Poetry
• March 6: Elizabeth Alexander's Amistad: A Versified Rendering of Black History
• March 5: Discovering Elizabeth Alexander's Poetry at Tougaloo Collge
• March 5: Elizabeth Alexander Week

No comments: