Excitement continues to build about Elizabeth Alexander’s planned reading of a poem at President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in on January 20.  It will be the first time since Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1997 that a poet has been featured at the ceremony.

Alexander was in residence at the Radcliffe Institute during the 2007–2008 academic year, when she held the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellowship and worked on several writing projects, including an untitled collection of new poems. She introduced Adrienne Rich ’51 when Rich delivered the Schlesinger Library’s Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture in April 2008 and called her “one of my North Stars.” Alexander was also featured in the Summer 2008 Radcliffe Quarterly, where her poem “The End” was reprinted from her book American Sublime, published by Graywolf Press in 2005. Graywolf has announced plans to publish an “instant book” of Alexander’s inaugural poem in an edition of 100,000 commemorative chapbooks, to be released on January 20.

The daughter of Radcliffe College alumna Adele Logan Alexander ’59, Alexander is a professor of African American studies at Yale University. 

Photo by Tony Rinaldo