Word: komunyakaa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...benign neglect, accumulated goodwill and a devoted cult of readers who will still be on deck reciting favorite lines should the poetic Titanic ever go down. But there's good news: the lifeboats have been launched. This publishing season brings three books--J.D. McClatchy's Ten Commandments, Yusef Komunyakaa's Thieves of Paradise and Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win--with room for passengers of every class...
...could accuse Yusef Komunyakaa, 50, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a tenured professor at Princeton, of writing self-indulgent, feel-good verse, and he shows why in Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University; 128 pages; $19.95). Raised in a particularly racist precinct of rural Louisiana, Komunyakaa, who is black, was drafted into the Vietnam War and assigned to write for the Southern Cross, a newspaper for infantrymen. Thirty years later, the artillery fire still echoes in his work. In "Ia Drang Valley," a slender, striking war poem both lyrical and blunt, a soldier dreams himself into...
...Prize for Literature. Rita Dove was appointed the country's first black poet laureate. Two works inspired by the Rodney King affair -- 56 Blows, a symphony by Alvin Singleton, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a one- woman docudrama by playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith -- were rousing successes. Yusef Komunyakaa became the third black, after Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove, to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The emotionally charged dances of choreographer Bill T. Jones -- who some critics say exemplifies the spirit of the new black upsurge -- were a powerful high point of last spring's Gay Games...
Last October, time senior correspondent Jack White noted that in the same week, one African-American author, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature while another, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, read her work at the White House. Not long thereafter, another black poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, won the Pulitzer Prize. White began to wonder whether these events and the increasing prominence of other African-American authors signaled a black literary efflorescence...