Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Yusef Komunyakaa to Give Reading at Bryn Mawr

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will give a reading at Bryn Mawr on Thursday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m., in the Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House.

Free and open to the public, Komunyakaa's appearance is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers and playwrights. For further information, contact the Office for the Arts at 610-526-5210.

Komunyakaa's writing career began when he served as a journalist for the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War. His experience as a soldier and as an African American who came of age in the rural South during the civil-rights era provide the inspiration for much of his poetry.

''I excavate history,'' Komunyakaa told a New York Times reporter for a 2004 profile. ''I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.''

Among Komunyakaa's 11 books of poems are Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise; Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award); and Dien Cai Dau.

His prose has been collected and published as Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries. Komunyakaa has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.

Komunyakaa is one of four poets taking part in this year's Creative Writing Program Reading Series who, in addition to holding a reading, will be spending several weeks at Bryn Mawr College as a guest instructor in a poetry master class.

The reading and master class are sponsored by a gift from Florence Newman Trefethen '43 and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 4/12/2007

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