Юсеф Комуньякаа: Американдық ақынның өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American poet

Yusef Komunyakaa (born James William Brown; April 29, 1941) and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his contribution to poetry. His subject matter ranges from the black experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights era and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.

According to public records, Komunyakaa was born in 1947 and given the name James William Brown. (His former wife said in her memoir that he was born in 1941.) He grew up in the small town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. As an adult, he reclaimed the name Komunyakaa, said to be his grandfather's African name. He said that his grandfather had reached the United States as a stowaway in a ship from Trinidad. Brown served in the US Army, serving one tour of duty in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. According to his former wife, Mandy Sayer, he was discharged on 14 December 1966. After his service, he attended college at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he was an editor for the campus arts and literature publication, riverrun, to which he also contributed. He began to write poetry in 1973 and took the name Yusef Komunyakaa. He earned his M. A. in Writing from Colorado State University in 1978, and an M. F. A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. After receiving his M. F. A., Komunyakaa began teaching poetry in the New Orleans public school system and creative writing at the University of New Orleans. Komunyakaa taught at Indiana University Bloomington until the fall of 1997, when he became an English professor at Princeton University. Yusef Komunyakaa is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Komunyakaa married Australian novelist Mandy Sayer in 1985. That year, he was hired as an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington. He also held the Ruth Lilly Professorship for two years from 1989 to 1990. He and Sayer were married for ten years. He later had a relationship with India born poet Reetika Vazirani with whom he had a child. Vazirani died in a murder suicide, killing their son Jehan and herself in 2003; he was two years old.