Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and spent her childhood in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England. Much of her work is concerned with questions of migration and memory. Her poetry includes Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk (2004) and Quickly Changing River (2008). She has written a memoir Fault Lines (1993, revised 2003) and edited the anthology Indian Love Poems (2005). She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and a 2008 Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation.