Word: komunyakaa
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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...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...