National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Elizabeth Alexander, poet, essayist, playwright and scholar; chancellor, Academy of American Poets; director of creativity and free expression, Ford Foundation; and Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. Elizabeth Alexander is the author of six books of poetry, including American Sublime, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize; two collections of essays; and The Light of the World, her critically acclaimed memoir on love and loss. Her writing explores such subjects as race, gender, politics, art, and history. Alexander earned her BA in English from Yale University in 1984, her MA in English (Creative Writing) from Boston University in 1987, and her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. She has received many awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees, among them grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She received the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry and is the inaugural recipient of the Jackson P