Watermark brings Komunyakaa to UW

Pulitzer prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa will give a poetry reading this Saturday as part of the graduate creative-writing Watermark reading series. The reading will be held at 7 p.m., in 220 Kane Hall with a reception in the Walker-Ames Room following the event. Tickets are $5. The reading is sponsored by the King County Arts Commission.

Komunyakaa is a chancellor to the Academy of American Poets and has just released his 10^th book of poetry, Thieves of Paradise. In this new, complex and beautiful poetry, Komunyakaa deciphers identity from the interaction of history and personal experience. He describes the experience of writing poetry as “trying to throw myself back into the emotional situation of the time, and at the same time bring a psychological overlay that juxtaposes new experiences alongside the one forming the old landscape inside my head.”

His poetry addresses important themes including place, history, memory, love, sex and sexuality, black manhood and masculinity, loss and grief. The book also features a long poem, Testimony—14 poems of two sonnets each—about be-bop saxophonist Charlie Parker’s life.

Komunyakaa was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1994 for his book Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems and is a professor of creative writing at Princeton. ¶