Re-Visioning Memoirs Old and New

Abstract

Meena Alexander is a poet, novelist, scholar, and memoirist whose writing has been published in translation in numerous languages. Born in Allahabad, India in 1951, she spent her childhood traveling between India and Sudan and, at age twenty-two, received her Ph.D. in British Romantic literature at Nottingham University, England. She married her Jewish American husband, historian David Lelyveld, and moved to the U.S. at age twenty-nine. She has lived in Manhattan for most of her nearly three decades in the U.S., and is Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She is a 2008 fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, working on a new book of poetry. Alexander's published works include: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology o/Romanticism (1979); Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecra/t, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989); Nampally Road: A Nouel (1991); Fault Lines: A Memoir (1993; revised and expanded 2003), which was one of the Publishers Weekly Best Books of 1993; The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); Manhattan Music: A Novel (1997); Illiterate Heart (2002), winner of the PEN Open Book Award; Raw Silk (2004); and Indian love Poems (2005). Her latest volume of poetry Quickly Changing River (2008) was published earlier this year. Alexander has written, in multiple genres, about her intensely personal