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A professor of African American studies at Yale University, Alexander is only the fourth poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration and the second Black woman to do so.
“This has become a moment where there is a larger national light that has been shined on poetry itself. To be able to talk with you, to talk with others about the vitality of this as an art form … about its place in everyday life, about its mystery and nonmystery — it is a richly complex art form, but it is also an art form that can appeal to many, many different people.”
With the official release of her poem on Feb. 6, Alexander was starting a round of interviews barely a fortnight (she inspires one to think in pretty words) after her worldwide debut as first poet. “I’m trying to take this moment to talk about poetry because that is the community I work in,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for all of us.”
Alexander, the author of five collections of poetry, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist American Sublime, follows in the footsteps of Maya Angelou who read in 1993 at President Bill Clinton’s ceremony. The other presidential poets were Robert Frost for President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Miller Williams for Clinton in 1997.
As to why she was chosen as “the one,” she says, “That would be a question for him. Certainly, in my work I have always had a sense of the historical and about the utility of the historical as a way of thinking about the future and I think … that is the approach that he shares in his acts, too.”
