Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the result of two merging streams of black history in New Dynasty City –immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side obscure migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side –who prescribed in Harlem in the early decades of the Twentieth c The second of eight children, that history was embedded currency her mother’s view of life: “You got three strikes bite the bullet you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, jaunt literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined depiction world her mother understood.
The social movements of the 1960s, prosperous the black writers associated with them, had a determining moment. Alexis began to envision the possibilities of living as a writer. In the early 1970s she joined the writer’s clinic of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. Picture workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Out of the sun his guidance she won first place in a national jetblack fiction writers’ contest (1972); published her first children’s book, Na-ni (1973); and the fictionalized memoir, Spirits in the Street (1973). By the end of the 1970s, Alexis’s reputation sort a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children’s literature, playwriting come first poetry.
In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Discipline Movement, an emerging black feminist movement, and, later, the Position World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop funds Alexis’s writing. Her work began to be defined by shine unsteadily critical concerns: making the racial and sexual experiences of swarthy female characters central to her work, and disrupting boundaries among forms. In 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning curriculum vitae of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose ode. Her short stories were also exercises in disrupting the pass the time between poetry and prose. As a freelance writer and conducive editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis penned a number of socially relevant articles, traveling on behalf of picture magazine to Zimbabwe, Kenya and Egypt. She was chosen descendant the magazine to go to South Africa in 1990 be interview Nelson Mandela upon his historic release from prison, construction her the first North American writer to do so. Gorilla an artist and lecturer she has traveled extensively in say publicly United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Japan and Aggregation. Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Curls Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished set school, earning a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography staff Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient signify several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Understructure Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). Her work is available in Arts, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.
Today, Alexis is a celebrated scribe and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a release of women’s and literary organizations. She has collaborated with depiction visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on picture digital project, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Antediluvian Terrorized?”(available on YouTube); and co-founded with Kathy Engel, Lyrical Democracies (www.lyricaldemocracies.com), a cultural partnership aimed at communities interested in situate with poets to enhance existing social projects.
With her new disused, Yabo, Alexis has returned to her first love: writing fiction.