Meena Alexander was born Mary Elizabeth Alexander on 17 February 1951 in Allahabad, India, to George and Mary (Kuruvilla) Alexander,[1] into a Syrian Christian family[2] from Kerala, India.[3][4] Her father was a meteorologist for the Indian government and her mother was a homemaker.[1] Her paternal grandmother was in an arranged marriage by age eight to her paternal grandfather, who was a wealthy landlord.[5] Her maternal grandmother, Kunju, died before Alexander was born, and had both completed higher education and been the first woman to become a member of the legislative assembly in Tavancore State.[5] Her maternal grandfather was a theologian and social reformer who worked with Gandhi, and had been the principal of Marthoma Seminary in Kottayam; he gave Alexander a variety of books, and talked to her about serious topics such as mortality, the Buddha, and apocalypse, before he died when she was eleven years old.[5]
Alexander lived in Allahabad and Kerala until she was five years old, when her family moved to Khartoum after her father accepted a post in the newly independent Sudan.[1][2] She continued to visit her grandparents in Kerala, was tutored at home on speaking and writing English, and finished high school in Khartoum at age 13.[5][6] Alexander recalled to Erika Duncan of World Literature Today that she began writing poetry as a child after she tried to mentally compose short stories in Malayalam but felt unable to translate them into written English; without an ability to write in Malayalam, she instead began writing her stories as poems.[5]
She enrolled in Khartoum University at age 13, and had some poems she wrote translated into Arabic (a language she could not read)[5] and then published in a local newspaper.[7][2] At age 15, she officially changed her name from Mary Elizabeth to Meena, the name she had been called at home.[7][8] In 1969, she completed a bachelor's degree in English and French from Khartoum University.[1] She began her PhD at age 18 in England.[2] In 1970, at age 19, she had what she described as "the time-honored tradition of a young intellectual ... having a nervous breakdown", where for more than a month she lost the ability to read and retreated to the country to rest.[9][5] She completed her PhD in British Romantic literature in 1973 at age 22 from University of Nottingham.[1][10]
After completing her PhD, Alexander returned to India, and was a lecturer in the English Department at Miranda House, University of Delhi in 1974, a lecturer in English and French at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, a lecturer in English at the Central Institute of English at the University of Hyderabad, from 1975 to 1977, during the National Emergency in India,[11][7] and a lecturer at the University of Hyderabad from 1977 to 1979.[12] She published her first volumes of poetry in India through the Kolkata Writers Workshop,[7] a publisher founded by P. Lal, a poet and professor of English at St. Xavier's College, Kolkata.[11] She also met David Lelyveld, a historian on sabbatical from the University of Minnesota, while they were in Hyderabad, and they married in 1979.[7][1] She then moved with her husband to New York City.[1][2] In 2009, she reflected on her move to the United States in the late 1970s, stating "There was a whole issue of racism that shocked me out of my wits. I never thought of myself as a person of color. I was normally the majority where I lived."[13]
