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Elizabeth Alexander: Signals Across Vast Distances

Essays and Tales

An evening with Elizabeth Alexander and Jonathan Capehart

A call to courage and connection from prize-winning poet and champion for the arts and humanities Elizabeth Alexander.

Join the Library and Politics and Prose Bookstore for a conversation with acclaimed poet Elizabeth Alexander. In conversation with journalist Jonathan Capehart, Alexander will discuss her new book of essays Signals Across Vast Distances. 

Books will be available for purchase at the event. 

About the book: “We send signals across vast distances, hoping to connect.” In luminous prose, Elizabeth Alexander embraces that hope, offering resources—life wisdom, historical perspective, poetry, and art—to embolden us to “reach beyond ourselves.” Her close readings of visionary poets, interwoven with extraordinary visual art, reveal how poetry and art can sustain us. Her stories of connection—as a daughter, wife, widow, and mother; as an aspiring dancer; on the dais at President Obama’s inauguration; in the hospital with her college-age son—deeply move us. She shines a light on our nation’s painful history of inequity, recounting in her Class Day speech to Yale students the thwarted dream destroyed in 1831 of a Black college in New Haven; she calls for a reckoning of centuries of injustice in historical memory and memorializing. She asks, What will we each do to make the dream of freedom, for everyone, real? Every page conveys her hope that we recognize the abundant resources we carry within: language, history, community, family, our bodies, our stories, love itself. Signals Across Vast Distances empowers us—in Alexander’s closing words—to lead with love.

About the author: Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. She composed and recited “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration and is currently president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities. She lives and works in New York City.

About the conversation partner: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart serves as a regular contributor to the PBS NewsHour. Capehart is a member of The Washington Post editorial board and hosts the "Cape Up" podcast. and Washington Post Live's "First Look." He also served as a Spring 2019 fellow at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. In 2014, Advocate magazine ranked Capehart 9th out of 50 of the most influential LGBT people in media. That same year, Mediaite named him one of the "Top 9 Rising Stars of Cable News." Equality Forum made him a 2018 LGBT History Month Icon. Capehart has twice made the OUT 100 list. In May 2018, the publisher of The Washington Post awarded him an "Outstanding Contribution Award" for his opinion writing and "Cape Up" podcast interviews.

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