Kent State to Host Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet

Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, will read at ’s Oscar Ritchie Hall, room 214, at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29 as part of the Wick Poetry Center’s 2011-2012 Reading Series.

A discussion of Komunyakaa's poetry will take place on Sunday, March 25 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at the as part of the Poetically Speaking series.

Mwatabu Okantah, Assistant Professor and Poet-in-Residence in the Department
of Pan-African Studies and Director of the Center of Pan-African Culture at Kent State, will lead the discussion. Packets of Komunyakaa's selected works can be
downloaded in advance from kentfreelibrary.org; however, no previous knowledge of his work is necessary to attend the event. Advanced registration is recommended via the library at 330-673-4414.

Grandson of Trinidadian stowaways, Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, LA. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army where he served as a combat reporter in South Vietnam, eventually becoming managing editor for the military paper, Southern Cross. The work he did as a reporter and editor earned him the Bronze Star.

Komunyakaa is best known for his montage and surrealistic poetic imagery that often draws on his experiences growing up as an African American in small town Louisiana and later as a soldier in Vietnam. Readers of his work will confront the splendid precision of restrained metaphor and persona, and themes ranging from racism, poverty, and the moral degradation of war to beauty, jazz and even hope.

Komunyakaa attended the University of Colorado where he graduated in 1975 with a B.A. Later he attended Colorado State University where he earned an M.A. in 1978, after which he earned an M.F.A at the University of California at Irvine in 1980. His first collection of poems, Dedications and Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, which he won for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, Komunyakaa has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the William Faulkner Prize. From 1999 to 2005 he served as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and he is currently Professor and Distinguished Senior Poet at New York University.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s reading is co-sponsored by Kent State University Libraries and the Department of Pan-African Studies, and is free and open to the public.