Meena Alexander

Biography

Meena Alexander is the author of Illiterate Heart (Winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award) and Raw Silk (2004), both published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern, and the memoir Fault Lines. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Centre, CUNY.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

In Whitman’s Country

By Meena Alexander

I cannot imagine myself in America without Whitman.

Sometimes, in times of difficulty, when reinvention of the self is a fierce necessity—a time such as now—I think of myself as having been wafted here by Walt, a creature with a tumbling...