Floyce Milton Alexander

Floyce Alexander, 84, of Bemidji, MN died Friday, September 22, 2023 at Neilson Place, Bemidji.

Memorial services will be 1:00 P.M., Thursday, October 12, 2023 at Neilson Place.

Floyce Alexander was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, December 31, 1938, the son of a western Arkansas coal miner whose own father was a cotton tenant farmer in eastern Oklahoma.

Growing up in the fifties in the lower Yakima Valley of Washington state, Alexander was paid ten cents per column inch for writing high school sports for a weekly newspaper for four years. Choosing to accept a journalism scholarship, he was sports editor of a nearby college weekly & editor in chief of the college yearbook before making his way to the University of Washington in Seattle. There he discovered not only his first city but another world of writing in fiction & poetry. He showed some of his work to Theodore Roethke, who encouraged him to continue.

For seven years, during the sixties, Alexander worked full time as an editor & writer at Washington State University, Pullman, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in English. He also holds the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, & has a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Since 1989 he has lived with the love of his life, Karenlee Alexander in Bemidji, Minnesota.

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