Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here

Meena Alexander

Meena Alexander is a poet and Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In addition to three earlier volumes of poetry published in her twenties when she was in India, she has six volumes of poetry including the collections, Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems.

Alexander's autobiography, Fault Lines, was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music; a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience and two academic studies, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley.

A book of essays on her work, Passage to Manhattan: Essays on Meena Alexander, was published in 2009.

Romy Ruukel

Romy Ruukel is an Estonian-born educator and poet and an editor for PM Press. Before moving to her current home in Boston, she taught and mentored students of all ages in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade.