INAUGURAL POET SELECTED: Elizabeth Alexander

December 18, 2008 by Vic Burkhammer

Elizabeth Alexander has been chosen Barack Obama‘s inaugural poet. Her poems are relaxed, “lazy” she said once, relatively brief, big enough, though, to hold Nat Turner, Mick Jagger; strong with memory and strong with the now. Her poems are confessional at times, sometimes from dreams, a fresh look at the world, poems that are luminous, compact carriers of light. Born in New York in 1962, she grew up in Washington, D.C. Now she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has a very impressive resume, including being a Pulitzer Prize finalist with her book “American Sublime” in 2005. Google her name. Visit her Web page.

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