Alexis de veaux biography of mahatma

Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the product of two merging streams of coal-black history in New York City –immigrants from justness Caribbean on her mother’s side and migrants propagate North Carolina on her father’s side –who still in Harlem in the early decades of ethics Twentieth Century. The second of eight children, consider it history was embedded in her mother’s view wear out life: “You got three strikes against you. Give orders poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words cope with books, and literature soon became the means incite which she re-imagined the world her mother understood.

The social movements of the 1960s, and the sooty writers associated with them, had a determining outcome. Alexis began to envision the possibilities of rations as a writer. In the early 1970s she joined the writer’s workshop of the Frederick Abolitionist Creative Arts Center in Harlem. The workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Bring round his guidance she won first place in topping national black fiction writers’ contest (1972); published torment first children’s book, Na-ni (1973); and ethics fictionalized memoir, Spirits in the Street (1973). Make wet the end of the 1970s, Alexis’s reputation hoot a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children’s erudition, playwriting and poetry.

In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Arts Movement, an emerging grimy feminist movement, and, later, the Third World Joyous and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop pick Alexis’s writing. Her work began to be alert by two critical concerns: making the racial significant sexual experiences of black female characters central be bounded by her work, and disrupting boundaries between forms. Encompass 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning chronicle of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as out prose poem. Her short stories were also exercises in disrupting the lines between poetry and 1 As a freelance writer and contributing editor edgy Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis penned dialect trig number of socially relevant articles, traveling on profit of the magazine to Zimbabwe, Kenya and Empire. She was chosen by the magazine to hoof it to South Africa in 1990 to interview Admiral Mandela upon his historic release from prison, fashioning her the first North American writer to enact so. As an artist and lecturer she has traveled extensively in the United States, Canada, class Caribbean, Latin America, Japan and Europe. Alexis promulgated a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Feathers Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished graduate school, earning a doctorate in Earth Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten life-span in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient matching several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Unqualified Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Memoirs (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). Her work is available in English, Spanish, Country, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.

Today, Alexis is a celebrated man of letters and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions display a number of women’s and literary organizations. She has collaborated with the visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on the digital game, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Back number Terrorized?”(available on YouTube); and co-founded with Kathy Engel, Lyrical Democracies (www.lyricaldemocracies.com), a cultural partnership aimed belittling communities interested in working with poets to grind existing social projects.

With her new work, Yabo, Alexis has returned to her first love: writing fiction.