Growing up in Washington, D.C., professor Elizabeth Alexander was raised in a family of influential leaders. Her father served as the U.S. secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, her grandfather served as treasurer at the Tuskegee Institute, her mother was a professor of history and even her great-aunt was an educator.
“I was taught — as so many of us Black children were — that education was something that could never be taken from you and that education was crucial, because as the old saying goes, we need to be very prepared for whatever might come our way,” says the 1984 Yale alum.
As a child, the seeds of storytelling were planted through her love for reading and hearing tales from others.
As an adult, Alexander has blossomed into an essayist, poet and playwright whose prose has taken her from prestigious university lecture halls to perhaps the grandest of stages: the Washington Mall at the 2009 presidential inauguration of the first African-American president.
In January 2015, she was named the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale College. Granted by Iseman, an American businessman and Yale alumnus, it is the first endowed chair at the institution dedicated solely to the field of poetry.
“What I think is very exciting about this position is, first of all, Mr. Iseman gave all of that money to say that poetry is important and to uphold the art,” says Alexander. “Then at Yale, they said the person who would be representative of the excellence and importance of poetry would not just be me, but would be an African-American poet — a feminist thinker, someone who is committed to Black culture. That’s what felt very forward-looking and exciting to me.”
It wasn’t until her undergraduate years, though, that she discovered her poetic voice. While studying at Boston University, Alexander frequently wrote what she referred to as “word clouds.” With insight from professor and Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, her clouds became clear.
