Elizabeth Alexander is Professor of American and African-American Studies at Yale University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2007–2008 academic year. She is the author of American Sublime (2005), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and The Venus Hottentot (1990), all from Graywolf Press; Body of Life (Tia Chucha Press, 1996); and Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (Wordsong, 2007), a young adult poetry collection which she co-authored with Marilyn Nelson. She has also published two essay collections, Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews and Interviews (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series, 2007), and The Black Interior (Graywolf Press, 2004). Alexander has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and more recently she was the inaugural recipient of both the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship and the Jackson Poetry Prize.