INAUGURAL POET

Elizabeth Alexander’s very public poem, Praise Song for the Day, written for the Obama inauguration, put poetry in the media spotlight. Dr. Alexander is chair of African American Studies at Yale University. She is also a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher born in New York City and raised in Washington, DC. Alexander has written four books of poems and her most recent, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

“… Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) / is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?”