It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Tuesday, June 30th.

With us now is the poet, author, and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander. She has a deep and heartbreaking

essay in the New Yorker called The Trayvon Generation about her own 20 and 22-year-old sons and really

all black Americans around 25 years old or younger, growing up with so many videos of black people

being killed and the effects

on mental health, among other things.

But the essay is teeming with a mother's love and a love for dance and community artistic

expression and does also contain hope.

This is essential reading on so many levels, in my opinion,

if you can take some time from everything else. It's also beautifully, beautifully written,

as we would expect from Elizabeth Alexander. Her memoir, The Light of the World, was a Pulitzer

Prize finalist when it came out in 2016. The Mellon Foundation, of which she is president,

makes grants in the arts and humanities

and has just announced this morning a new focus on social justice

and a new program to place half a million books

in prisons and juvenile facilities across the U.S.

So we'll get to that too.

Ms. Alexander, an honor to have you today.

Welcome to WN.YC. Oh. Alexander, an honor to have you today. Welcome to WN. NYC.

Oh, it is an honor to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Can I start with the part of the essay that's about you as a mother?

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