Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet and interdisciplinary practitioner/ project director. Her second collection, Painstar, Starline, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Her debut collection, A Stone’s Throw from C R A Y (New American Press), received the New American Prize. Alexander earned a BA from New York University, where she was awarded the Herbert Rubin Prize in Poetry, and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Her other honors include the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, Breakwater Peseroff Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, and other literary journals. She is the Benedetti Teaching Artist-in-Residence for MCLA + MOSAIC (2027). A committed arts organizer and collaborator, Alexander is cofounder of Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine, where she has also served as Founding Director of Interdisciplinary Arts.

Main Questions:

Does the self become most itself when it becomes unfinished enough to receive what exceeds it? Can lyric language change the ontology of what it touches? And how can a collective voice remain made of singular lives? In my work, the speaker becomes a receiver of accumulated intensities that transform the subject, making it permeable enough to be inhabited. Under my work’s purview, sight’s smell, sound’s taste, touch’s vision open portals through which missing histories return and the self undergoes decreative undoing. My second book project, Painstar, Starline, engages Black diasporic memory through synaesthetic and mythopoetic practices, blurring and redoubling perception between the senses. At the center of the book is the concept of the “painstar,” adapted from Cate Wurtz's "lamezine’ comics, which is a force that transmits the most extreme human pain upon touch. This figure of transmission ignites questions about the enabling limit of the shifting category, “human,” in my work. My poetry encounters the illimitation of un-bearability in Black life, a reversative force, and a form of generative failure that translates and partially carries what moves across persons, generations, geographies, and temporalities. Painstar, Starline mixes and extends the realms of speculative poetry, Afro-surrealist expressionist traditions, submerged historiographies, employing vivid description in which geography and emotional states are co-constituted. This combination offers a relational map of diasporic living-on through which to navigate unbearable terrains. Using poetic composition alongside theoretical frameworks from Saidiya Hartman, Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and others, my work contributes to contemporary poetry, Black studies, and memory studies by advancing constitutive and poetic entanglements with history, precarity, residue, and transformation.