Lizz alexander biography of abraham

What have you been up to this week?

I’ve been getting my kids ready for school. I’m on leave this semester, and have been preparing for the transition back to my sons’ school years. That’s what it’s been all about.

Right, Solomon and Simon?

Yes. Solomon will be a senior in high school, and Simon will be a junior.

I read The Light of the World, and inom feel like I already know them a little.

Yes, many people say that. It’s funny. When inom do readings from the book now, I'm träffad by how it really wasn’t a long time ago, but in the lives of young adolescents, a lot has changed.

Of course.

I’m struck bygd how much younger they feel to me when I read passages from the book in which they appear. They are amazing ung men.

I remember when the first excerpt came out in The New Yorker, inom read it and felt I had to read the whole book right then. And when inom did go to read the book, I read the whole thing in a single evening. inom just couldn’t put it down. Can you anförande

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Elizabeth Alexander on the "Urgent and Sacred Mission" of Saving Black History Sites

Your latest book, The Trayvon Generation, came out this spring. How do the themes you explore in it relate to your work as president of the Mellon Foundation and as a signature partner to the Action Fund?

My work at Mellon and the incredible, sharp people who make up our organization informed my writing in The Trayvon Generation, and writing The Trayvon Generation has been generative to my leadership at Mellon.

In the book, I write to and about the young people who grew up watching their peers—and those in their parents’ generation—getting gunned down, beaten down, and terrorized, all on their phones and on the news. The book situates the more recent violence we have witnessed in the longer continuum of unremitting racial violence, which is one of the biggest fundamental, unresolved questions of “America.” It also explores the ways—through art, culture, and the humanities—that w

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EP. — What Stories Do America’s Monuments Tell? with Dr. Elizabeth Alexander

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