Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales - Hardcover

In this deeply personal book, Elizabeth Alexander gives us profound and galvanizing lessons from culture and life to move through challenging times. In close readings of visionary and beloved poets and writers--Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and June Jordan, among others--Dr. Alexander meditates on how words and values can sustain and inspire us, interweaving her voice with revelatory works of art by some of our most extraordinary visual artists, richly reproduced in the book's pages.

Her stories of connection--as a daughter, wife, widow, and mother of two sons; reflecting at midlife on her younger days as an aspiring dancer; as a poet at President Obama's inauguration on the dais alongside her father, a civil rights pioneer; urging radical welcome in our families, communities, and country--engage and move us. Her reflections on the public project of acknowledging historical truths, a focus of her leadership at the Mellon Foundation, model courageous action.

Throughout the book, Alexander poses questions, encouraging readers to recognize the abundant resources we carry within or can access: language, history, art, community, family, our bodies, our stories, and love itself. In luminous and powerful prose, Signals Across Vast Distances calls us to imagine possibilities, take courage, and--in Alexander's closing words--lead with love.

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Praise for Elizabeth Alexander

"Elizabeth Alexander is a student, and dare I say, master of the craft. Her work is inspirational in a way that The Great Gatsby...is inspirational, in that it just says so much about who we are."
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, in The Atlantic

"A prose writer of deep talent and affecting skill."
-- James McBride, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Color of Water

"A virtuosic writer and a shrewd analyst of American letters."
-- The Root

"A marvelous poet, an incisive and influential scholar, and one of the great citizens of the literary world."
-- Alice Quinn, former executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former poetry editor for The New Yorker

"[Elizabeth Alexander] seems much like Walt Whitman. She sings the American song."
-- Maya Angelou