Alexis De Veaux: Author • Poet • Activist • Yabo

Join me as I speak with Alexis De Veaux: Author • Poet • Activist about her newest work of love, Yabo.

Alexis De Veaux was born and raised in Harlem, the product of two merging streams of black history in New York City-immigrants from the Caribbean on her mother’s side and migrants from North Carolina on her father’s side-who settled in Harlem in the early decades of the twentieth century. The second of eight children, that history was embedded in her mother’s view of life: “You got three strikes against you. You poor, you black, and you female.” But Alexis was drawn to the world of words and books and literature soon became the means by which she re-imagined the world her mother understood.

As an artist and lecturer she has traveled extensively in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Japan, and Europe. Alexis published a second award-winning children’s book, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987) before moving to Buffalo; where she finished graduate school, earning a doctorate in American Studies, in 1992. A project nearly ten years in the making, her biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet (2004) has been the recipient of several awards, including the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award (2004), the Lambda Literary Award for Biography (2004), the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, Non-fiction (2005). Her work is available in English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Serbo-Croatian.

With her new work, Yabo, Alexis has returned to her first love: writing fiction.