Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. A nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, the arts, and American society, she is also president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities.

Dr. Alexander’s most recent book, The Trayvon Generation (2022), is a galvanizing meditation on the power of art and culture to illuminate America’s unresolved problem with race and the challenges facing young Black America. Among the fifteen books she has authored or co-authored, her poetry collection American Sublime was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015. Other works include Crave Radiance:  New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (2010), Power and Possibility:  Essays, Reviews, Interviews (2007), The Black Interior:  Essays (2004), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990). She has been awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the George Kent Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes for Poetry. Notably, she composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. 

Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Yale University – where she taught for over 15 years and helped rebuild and chaired the African American Studies Department – and Columbia University. Prior to joining the Mellon Foundation, she served as the director of Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, shaping Ford’s grantmaking vision in arts and culture, journalism, and documentary film. During that time, she co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative that uses art and advocacy to address the crisis of mass incarceration. 

Dr. Alexander holds a BA from Yale University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She serves on the boards of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a former co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board. In 2019, she received the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University. Among her many other honors, she has been recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.