Elizabeth Alexander (born May 30, 1962) is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018.

Previously, Alexander was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department.

[1] She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

[7]: 9–10  Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a member of the president-elect's transition team.

Alexander originally entered studying fiction writing, but Walcott looked at her diary and saw the poetry potential.

[7]: 11 In 1996, she published a volume of poetry, Body of Life, and a verse play, Diva Studies, which was staged at Yale University.

[18] Alexander is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays entitled The Black Interior.

[19] On January 20, 2009, at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, Alexander recited her poem "Praise Song for the Day", which she had composed for the occasion.

[6][8] She became only the fourth poet to read at an American presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997.

[20] The announcement of her selection was favorably received by her fellow poets Maya Angelou, Rita Dove,[20] Paul Muldoon,[6] and Jay Parini, who extolled her as "smart, deeply educated in the traditions of poetry, true to her roots, responsive to black culture.

"[20] Though the selection of the widely unknown poet, who was a personal friend of Obama, was lauded, the actual poem and delivery were met with a poor reception.

[21] the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times Book editor, and most critics found that "her poem was too much like prose," and that "her delivery [was] insufficiently dramatic."

[24] In 2010, Alexander participated in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS series Faces of America, which explored her ancestry and analyzed her DNA.