YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA IS author of 13 books of poetry,
including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon
Vernacular, Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, Talking
Dirty to the Gods, and Thieves
of Paradise, the last two of which were finalists for the
National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Robert Hass calls his collection, Dien Cai Dau, “probably the best book by
an American about the Vietnam War.”
His work mixes elements of his Louisiana upbringing and
Vietnam experience with his knowledge of jazz and the African
diaspora. Editor of
The Best American Poetry
2003, he teaches creative writing at Princeton University
and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
KEVIN YOUNG’S NEWEST book of blue-based love
poems, Jelly Roll, is, according to Billy Collins,
“tender, sassy, and just plain cool.”
His first book, Most
Way Home, was a National Poetry Series selection and won
a Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. His second collection, To Repel Ghosts, a “double album” based on the work of the late artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat, is a meditation on the nature of black
genius and iconography. Editor
of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African
American Writers and the forthcoming Everyman Pocket Poets
Blues Poems anthology, he is currently
Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University.
