An essayist, playwright, and chair of Yale’s department of African American studies, Alexander is perhaps best known as the award-winning poet whose “Praise Song for the Day” graced Obama’s first inauguration. Her memoir is an eloquent elegy for her late husband, the Eritrean-born painter Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died suddenly at age fifty. Now raising their two sons alone, Alexander pays tribute to art and family, the enduring compensations for loss.
Alexander will be in conversation with E. Ethelbert Miller, poet, memoirist, teacher, and long-time director of Howard University’s African-American Resource Center.
