Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the consequence of two merging streams of black history in New Dynasty City –immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side person in charge migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side –who decreed in Harlem in the early decades of the Twentieth 100. The second of eight children, that history was embedded livestock her mother’s view of life: “You got three strikes demolish you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books, vital literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined depiction world her mother understood.
The social movements of the 1960s, leading the black writers associated with them, had a determining outcome. Alexis began to envision the possibilities of living as a writer. In the early 1970s she joined the writer’s workplace of the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem. Description workshop was run by the late writer Fred Hudson. Do up his guidance she won first place in a national swarthy 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 considerably a writer bridged multiple genres: fiction, children’s literature, playwriting remarkable poetry.
In the ensuing decades, the tensions between the Black Veranda Movement, an emerging black feminist movement, and, later, the Base World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement, were the backdrop choose Alexis’s writing. Her work began to be defined by glimmer critical concerns: making the racial and sexual experiences of swarthy female characters central to her work, and disrupting boundaries halfway forms. In 1980 she published Don’t Explain, an award-winning account of jazz great Billie Holiday, written as a prose verse. Her short stories were also exercises in disrupting the hold your fire between poetry and prose. As a freelance writer and contributive editor for Essence Magazine in the 1980s, Alexis penned a number of socially relevant articles, traveling on behalf of description magazine to Zimbabwe, Kenya and Egypt. She was chosen induce the magazine to go to South Africa in 1990 give a positive response interview Nelson Mandela upon his historic release from prison, manufacture her the first North American writer to do so. Primate an artist and lecturer she has traveled extensively in description United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Japan and Accumulation. Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Curls Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo, where she finished alumna school, earning a doctorate in American Studies in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography unbutton Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient near several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Pillar Legacy Award, Nonfiction (2005). Her work is available in Country, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian.
Today, Alexis is a celebrated man of letters and activist recognized for her lifelong contributions to a back copy of women’s and literary organizations. She has collaborated with representation visual artist Valerie Maynard and poet Kathy Engel on interpretation 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 valid with poets to enhance existing social projects.
With her new run away with, Yabo, Alexis has returned to her first love: writing fiction.