NEWS RELEASE

10/1/02

CONTACT: John Sanford, News Service: (650) 736-2151, jsanford@stanford.edu

COMMENT: Rick Barot, English Department: (650) 723-0499, (650) 725-1208, rbarot@stanford.edu

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to read from work Oct. 9

Yusef Komunyakaa, who is teaching an undergraduate workshop this autumn as the Lawrence and Nancy Mohr Visiting Poet, is scheduled to read from his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9, in Kresge Auditorium.

Komunyakaa also will hold a colloquium at 11 a.m. Nov. 13 in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

A native of Bogalusa, La., Komunyakaa was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, which was published in 1994. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has written 12 books of poetry, the most recent of which are Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001), Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000) and Thieves of Paradise (1998), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Komunyakaa has received numerous other awards and honors, including the William Faulkner Prize from the University of Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He earned a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he worked as a reporter and managing editor of the Army newspaper Southern Cross.

Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries (2000), and he served as co-editor of The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991). He lives in New York City.

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