Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet and Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. He has taught at University of New Orleans, Indiana University, as a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.His poetry publications include Copacetic (1984); I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Warhorses(2008);Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1; Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001);Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise(1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Magic City (1992). Komunyakaa’s prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). Komunyakaa is the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Programming
