Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India. She has a B.A. Honors in French and English from Khartoum University and a Ph.D. from Nottingham University. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches Hunter College and the Graduate Center. Her works have been widely anthologized and translated. They include Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Quickly Changing River, and the forthcoming Birthplace with Buried Stones. She has edited Indian Love Poems and published a critically acclaimed memoir Fault Lines (picked as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the year). Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and Threepenny Review.
Her poems have been set to music, including “Impossible Grace,” which was the lyric base of the First Al Quds Music Award and “Acqua Alta,” which was set to music by the Swedish composer Jan Sandstrom for