(Carson, Calif.) – Nationally-renowned novelist and American Book Award winner Will Alexander will be the featured speaker for California State University, Dominguez Hills’ (CSUDH) 2019 Patricia Eliet Memorial Lecture on Tuesday, April 23, from 7 to 9 p.m., in Loker Student Union Ballroom. The free lecture is hosted by CSUDH’s Department of English and is open to the public.
Alexander has written more than 30 books and chapbooks, including Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose, Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture, which won the American Book Award in 2013, and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome and Across the Vapour Gulf, recent collections of poetry from New Directions Press. He was also honored with the 2016 Jackson Prize for poetry.
The Patricia Eliet Memorial Lecture Series honors former CSUDH professor of English Patricia Eliet, who taught at the university from 1969 to 1990. Past guest lecturers have included David Gerrold (2014), Sara Shun-lien Bynum (2015), Walter Mosley (2016), Karen Tei Yamashita (2017) and Junot Diaz (2018).
Alexander’s work explores a huge range of human experience, including art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, and architecture, but his greatest focus is on issues related to worldwide social justice and connections between language and consciousness. A multifaceted artist, he is also a prominent poet, essayist, playwright, aphorist, visual artist, and pianist.
In describing Alexander’s work, distinguished poet Harryette Mullen has said, “His literary influences connect him to an international avant-garde, just as his experience as an African American connects him to a black diaspora, and to the political struggles of Third World people.”
Alexander has also been a Whiting Fellow and a California Arts Council Fellow. Currently, he is the poet-in-residence at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, Ca., which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and he serves as a lecturer at both Pomona College and Portland State University.
