Dr. Elizabeth Alexander

Elizabeth Alexander – decorated poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate – is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  She has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Dr. Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, and is author or co-author of fifteen books, including American Sublime (Pulitzer finalist, Poetry, 2006), The Light of the World (Pulitzer finalist, Biography, 2015), and The Trayvon Generation (2022).

You can follow Dr. Alexander on Twitter @ProfessorEA and Instagram @alexanderlizzy, and at elizabethalexander.net.

Guest Appearances

June 15, 2022

You’re planning an afternoon with friends, just east of Atlanta, Georgia. A picnic, maybe a scenic walk, some fireworks as the sun goes down. You find a park that seems to have it all: Stone Mountain. Then you do some research on it—and learn that it holds significance for the Confederacy AND the modern Ku Klux Klan. WTF?! In the lead-up to Juneteenth, Dr. Elizabeth Alexander joins Jonathan to explore the history and contemporary significance of America’s monuments—who’s represented, in what ways, and what it’ll take to change these narratives.

Elizabeth Alexander – decorated poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate – is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  She has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board.

Dr. Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, and is author or co-author of fifteen books, including American Sublime (Pulitzer finalist, Poetry, 2006), The Light of the World (Pulitzer finalist, Biography, 2015), and The Trayvon Generation (2022).

You can follow Dr. Alexander on Twitter @ProfessorEA and Instagram @alexanderlizzy, and at elizabethalexander.net.

Want to know what the Mellon Foundation is up to? You can follow their work on Twitter and Instagram @mellonfdn.

Want to learn more about monuments? Check out the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, and the work of Monument Lab.

A special thank you to all of our listeners who submitted questions for Dr. Alexander, they very much guided this episode!

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Headshot Credit for Dr. Alexander: Djeneba Aduayom

June 3, 2016

Elizabeth Alexander speaks from the heart. An accomplished author and playwright, she delivered her poem, Praise Song for the Day, to an audience of millions at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Alexander, a professor of African-American Studies at Yale, speaks with David about how everyone can learn to appreciate poetry, how students on campuses are fighting a necessary fight for a more accurate depiction of history, and how poetry helped her know she was still alive after the death of her husband.

This episode is sponsored by Urban Dapper Club, The Great Courses, and Ibotta.