The Light of the World
Elizabeth Alexander, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455599875
Summary
A deeply resonant memoir for anyone who has loved and lost, from acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander.
In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid price, Alexander tells a love story that is, itself, a story of loss.
As she reflects on the beauty of her married life, the trauma resulting from her husband's death, and the solace found in caring for her two teenage sons, Alexander universalizes a very personal quest for meaning and acceptance in the wake of loss.
The Light of the World is at once an endlessly compelling memoir and a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of love, family, art, and community. It is also a lyrical celebration of a life well-lived and a paean to the priceless gift of human companionship. For those who have loved and lost, or for anyone who cares what matters most, The Light of the World is required reading. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 30, 1962
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—Washington, DC
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A., Boston University; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award; numerous fellowships
• Currently—lives in New Haven, Connecticut
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, essayist, playwright and a university professor. She is also the author of a memoir, The Light of the World (2015)
Alexander was born in Harlem, New York City. After she was born, the family moved to Washington, D.C. She was just a toddler when her parents brought her in March 1963 to the March on Washington, site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Alexander recalled that "Politics was in the drinking water at my house."
She is the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander, Jr. and Adele (Logan) Alexander, a teacher of African-American women's history at George Washington University and writer. Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a member of the president-elect's transition team.
She was educated at Sidwell Friends School, and graduated in 1980. From there she went to Yale University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1984.
She studied poetry at Boston University under Derek Walcott and got her Master's in 1987. Her mother had said to her, "That poet you love, Derek Walcott, is teaching at Boston University. Why don't you apply?" Alexander originally entered studying fiction writing, but Walcott looked at her diary and saw the poetry potential. Alexander said, "He gave me a huge gift. He took a cluster of words and he lineated it. And I saw it."
In 1992, she received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. While she was finishing her degree, she taught at nearby Haverford College from 1990 to 1991.
At this time, she would publish her first work, The Venus Hottentot. The title comes from Sarah Baartman, a 19th-century South African woman of the Khoikhoi ethnic group. Elizabeth is an alumna of the Ragdale Foundation.
After College
While a graduate student, she was a reporter for the Washington Post for a year (1984-85. She soon realized that "it wasn't the life I wanted." She began teaching at University of Chicago in 1991 as an assistant professor of English. Here she would first meet future president Barack Obama, who was a senior lecturer at the school's law school from 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. While in Chicago in 1992, she won a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1996, she published a volume of poetry, Body of Life and a verse play, Diva Studies, which was staged at Yale University. She also became a founding faculty member of the Cave Canem workshop which helps develop African-American poets.
In 1997, she received the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Later in that year, she moved to Massachusetts to teach at Smith College. She became the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence and the first director of the college's Poetry Center.
In 2000, she returned to Yale University, where she would teach African-American studies and English. She also released her third poetry collection, Antebellum Dream Book.
In 2005, she was selected in the first class of Alphonse Fletcher Foundation fellows and in 2007-08, she was an academic fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Since 2008, Alexander has chaired the African American Studies department at Yale. She currently teaches English language/literature, African-American literature and gender studies at Yale.
Works
Alexander's poems, short stories and critical writings have been widely published in such journals and periodicals such as: The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Village Voice, Women's Review of Books, and Washington Post. Her play, Diva Studies, which was performed at the Yale School of Drama, garnered her a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship as well as an Illinois Arts Council award.
Her 2005 volume of poetry, American Sublime was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize of that year. Alexander is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior.
Alexander received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry in 2010.
Obama Inauguration
On January 20, 2009, at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, Alexander recited the poem "Praise Song for the Day," which she composed for the occasion. She became only the fourth poet to read at an American presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997.
The announcement of her selection was favorably received by her fellow poets, including Maya Angelou. The Poetry Foundation also hailed the choice: "Her selection affirms poetry's central place in the soul of our country."
Though the selection of the widely unknown poet, who was a personal friend of Obama, was lauded, the actual poem and delivery were met with a poor reception. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times Book editor, and most critics found that "her poem was too much like prose," and that "her delivery [was] insufficiently dramatic." The Minneapolis Star-Tribune found the poem "dull, 'bureaucratic' and found it proved that "the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them."
Personal life
On a 2010 PBS episode of Faces of America, it was revealed, that Alexander is a lineal cousin of Stephen Colbert. The revelation was based on DNA analysis by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. Her paternal grandfather came to the United States in 1918 from Kingston, Jamaica.
She was married to Ficre Ghebreyesus until his death in April 2012. She lives with their two sons in New Haven, Connecticut. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Alexander was devastated by the death of her artist husband, who died of cardiac arrest at age 50.... This memoir is an elegiac narrative of the man she loved.... Alexander is grateful, patient, and willing to pursue a fit of magical thinking that he might just return.
Publishers Weekly
Expect truth and beauty in this heartrending memoir from poet Alexander, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who recited her "Praise Song for the Day" at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration.
Library Journal
A distinguished poet meditates on the early death of her beloved artist husband.... At the same time, she celebrates how the love she and Ficre shared.... In letting go of—but never forgetting—her husband, Alexander realizes a simple truth: that death only deepens the richness of a life journey that must push on into the future. A delicate, existentially elegiac memoir.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)