Poet, novelist, literary scholar, and academic, Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India in 1951 to parents who belonged to the South Indian state of Kerala. Named Mary Elizabeth Alexander after her grandmother, she began writing poems under the name Meena Alexander, Meena being the name she was addressed to at home. Alexander’s oeuvre includes the award-winning collection of poems, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award, as well as Raw Silk (2004), Indian Love Poems (2005), and Quickly Changing River (2008). She has also written two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997), a book of essays and poems, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996), two books of literary scholarship [among which Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989)], and the memoir Fault...
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Citation: Pulugurtha, Nishi. "Meena Alexander". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 May 2011; last revised 15 August 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=69, accessed 09 June 2026.]
