Elizabeth Alexander

Background

Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York and raised in Washington, D.C. She is the the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander Jr. (D). ²

Academic Career

Elizabeth Alexander has taught at Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania. She has previously worked as the Grace Hazard Conkling poet-in-residence and inaugural poetry director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, was a fellow of the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, was the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry and chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University, and was a Wun Tsun Tam Mellon professor in the humanities at Columbia University.  ^{3 2}

Nonprofit Career

Since March 2018, Elizabeth Alexander has been the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a private arts and humanities grantmaking foundation headquartered in New York City. ^{2 1}

Elizabeth Alexander is also a founding member and member of the workshop faculty of Cave Canem, an organization focused on promoting African-American poets and poetry, a member of the founding editorial collective for the left-of-center journal Meridians, a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the African Poetry Book Foundation. ^{2 3 1}

Previously, Elixabeth Alexander served as the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2015 to 2020, the director of creativity for the Ford Foundation, and the co-designer of the Art for Justice Fund, a project of the Ford Foundation in partnership with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The project advocates for reducing the prison population in the United States and has received funding provided by the sale of art in the personal collection of Agnes Gund, who is also the chair of the fund’s governing board. ^{4 2 3 1}

Politics

In January 2009, Elizabeth Alexander, composed and read a poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, which Adam Kirsch in The New Republic  described as “a perfect specimen” of “bureaucratic verse.” ^{2 5}

Advocacy

In an interview with the Society of Undergraduate Humanities Publications, published on December 3, 2020, Elizabeth Alexander described the distribution of resources in the United States as “unfair” and claimed that “Enslaved labor built” the country. In July 2020, she wrote an article published by the New Yorker magazine which claimed racism and racist violence are prevalent in the United States and described the death of George Floyd in May 2020 as a “lynching” and the then-police officers involved in the arrest and death of Floyd as a “mob.” ^{6 7}