Lizz alexander biography of barack

Elizabeth Alexander was a fitting choice to write and read a poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration. In her five books of poems and two books of essays and interviews, Alexander’s writing has centered on African-American history and identity.

She is a poet aware of her place in a tradition and community for which writing

has always been part of the civil rights struggle; her style is intimate and accessible, pared down and lucid, its elevation an effect of precise but ordinary speech.

On Inauguration Day 2009, she read from the podium, but her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” spoke of the history and hopes of the people assembled on ground level, stretching from the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial—where, as a child, Alexander heard Martin Luther King Jr.

deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The poems presented here are full of that historical consciousness. Stokely Carmichael, the dedicated revolutionary and pan-Africanis