"Elizabeth Alexander is many things. She’s a poet, a philanthropist, an educator, and an intellectual, but most of all, she’s a visionary. In her six books of poetry, Alexander is an explorer who’s constantly finding new ways to tell the stories of Black America. And through her work as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the largest funder of arts and education in the U.S.—she has put real investment into creating spaces that reflect the country’s rich diversity, and rethinking how we can embrace our cultural narratives, whether through physical monuments or the ways in which we tell our stories," writes Lynn Nottage for TIME's issue on the most influential people of 2022.
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