Selection Provides Civil Rights Symmetry

Poet Elizabeth Alexander was 1 when her parents took her to the March on Washington. On Jan. 20, she will read at the swearing-in of the first African American U.S. president. (By C.j. Gunther For The Washington Post)

"She was there in the stroller," her father said.

Her mother, Adele Alexander, a professor of African American women's history at George Washington University, said: "There would absolutely be no way that we couldn't take her. It was important. It was monumental."

Her daughter's task next month at the opposite end of the Mall is "thrilling," she said. "The parallelism is fabulous there."

Her father said: "It could not be more wonderful. She is an absolutely superb poet, a superb daughter and a superb person."

Elizabeth Alexander was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 and winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize last year. She is also a friend and former neighbor of Obama's in Chicago, and her younger brother Mark, whom she introduced to Obama, was a senior adviser during the campaign and is helping with the presidential transition.

She is the author of four books of poems, "The Venus Hottentot," "Body of Life," "Antebellum Dream Book" and "American Sublime," which was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Several of her poems can be found on her Web site at http://www.elizabethalexander.net/poems.html.

"I'm deeply, deeply, deeply honored, not just to be part of it but to be part of it for this president at this moment," she said.

She said she will have to write a special poem.

"I have to write something to commemorate this occasion. I have to find a way to ask the best of myself," she said.

"Surely the world expected that someone like Barack Obama would want to have poetry at his inaugural," she said. "His care with language and his sense of vision would make us think that he's that kind of person."

The poetry and literary community had been abuzz for weeks over whether a poet might read and, if so, whom it would be, said Tree Swenson of the Academy of American Poets in New York City.

Derek Walcott, a West Indies poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, wrote a poem about Obama after his election. And the president-elect, who reportedly wrote poetry in high school and college, was recently photographed carrying a book of what looked like Walcott's poetry.