[4] 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 Travancore State.

[4] 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.

[4] 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][5] 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.

[4] She enrolled in Khartoum University at age 13, and had some poems she wrote translated into Arabic (a language she could not read)[4] and then published in a local newspaper.

[5] 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.

[8] Ranjit Hoskote said of her poetry, "Her language drew as much on English as it did on Hindi and Malayalam – I always heard, in her poems, patterns of breath that seemed to come from sources in Gangetic India, where she spent part of her childhood, and her ancestral Malabar.

[14] While she lived in Khartoum, she had been taught to speak and write British English;[8] in 2006, she told Ruth Maxey, "When I came to America, I found the language amazingly liberating.

[1] She also wrote the collection Raw Silk (2004), which includes a set of poems that relate to the September 11 attacks and the time afterwards.

[citation needed] Alexander also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991), which was a Village Voice Literary Supplement Editor's Choice in 1991,[21] and Manhattan Music (1997), as well as two academic studies: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (1979), based on her dissertation,[6] and Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (1989).

[29] Influences on her writing include Jayanta Mahapatra,[6] Kamala Das, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, and Galway Kinnell,[30] as well as Toru Dutt, Lalithambika Antherjanam, Sarojini Naidu, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, Nawal El Saadawi, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

[12] She was the recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award from the South Asian Literary Association for contributions to American literature.

Vijay Seshadri wrote: "The beautiful paradox of Meena Alexander’s art has always been found in the distillation of her epic human and spiritual experience into pure and exquisite lyricism.

"[69] As to the anthology she edited, Name Me A Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing, Simon Gikandi wrote: "Name Me A Word is an indispensable guide for readers of Indian writing, animating the powerful impulses of the country's famous writers and introducing the multiple voices that went into the making of the most important literature of our time.