Poet Elizabeth Alexander on balancing life, loss and a $500-million mission

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred On the Shelf Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales By Elizabeth Alexander W.W.

Norton & Co.: 144 pages, $27If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.While Elizabeth Alexander ‘s career trajectory has taken her from scholar and author to educator, cultural advocate and most recently philanthropy, she considers herself first and foremost a poet.“Day job by day, writer by night,” she quips about her two very different and separate identities.On the creative side, Alexander’s bona fides as a writer of poetry and prose are impressive: six volumes of poetry, including the 2009 poem for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day,” three essay collections and, most recently, “The Light of the World,” a moving memoir of love, grief and meaning in the wake of loss.

On the business front, she’s the president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest private funder of the arts culture and the humanities in the United States.How does she bring such seemingly disparate parts of her life together in service of her work?It starts with presence.Over our Zoom call, Alexander is engaging, calm but focused on the things that matter in her life: poetry, family, community, justice and connection.

She quotes freely from poetry in conversation, and says she keeps the poems that inspire her in an “internal Rolodex,” as offerings to colleagues and students.And now, readers in “Signals Across Vast Distances,” a collection of transformational essays and stories, 10 years in the making, about life’s challenges and how poetry, art and the humanities can connect and sustain us through difficult times.The book’s title is taken from a 1967 Muriel Rukeyser poem in which she writes of �...