This appendix is designed to provide the fullest and most up-to-date biographical information available to students of contemporary verse. In addition to consulting scholarly analyses of the poets and their works, I have made use of information available in Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1962–), The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Gale Research Co., 1978–), Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Frank Magill (New York: Holt, 1994), The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd edition, eds. Richard Ellman and Robert O’Clair (New York: Norton, 1988), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994). I have conferred with the individual poets to confirm and augment this information when at all possible.

elizabeth alexander (1962-)

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City in 1962, and attended Yale University as an undergraduate. After receiving a B.A. in 1984, she went to Boston University on a Martin Luther King Fellowship to study with the West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott. There she took an M.A. in 1987. Alexander completed her graduate education at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1992), writing a doctoral dissertation entitled Collage: An Approach to Reading African-American Women’s Literature.