Komunyakaa Receives Major Poetry Award

Recognized for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, Blue Notes author Yusef Komunyakaa has been selected as the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award from The Academy of American Poets. Chosen by The Academy's Board of Chancellors, a body of fifteen eminent poets, Komunyakaa will receive a stipend of $100,000 and be honored at the fifth annual Poets Forum, October 20-22, in New York City. He will read from his work at the Poets Awards Ceremony on Friday, October 21, 7:00 p.m. at The New School's Tishman Auditorium.

Featured as a part of the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, Komunyakaa's books include Blue Notes, a collection of essays, interviews, poems, and performance texts.

Blue Notes offers an assortment of Komunyakaa's writing on contemporary poetry and music. The book is arranged in four sections. The first gathers essays on the work of poets and blues and jazz musicians influential to Komunyakaa's work, from Langston Hughes and Etheridge Knight to Ma Rainey and Thelonious Monk; the second collects a gallery of Komunyakaa's poems and the poet's commentary about each of them. The third selects interviews that reveal the development of the poet's aesthetic sensibility. The final section consists of four artistic explorations that reflect the poet's current interests. Two of of these texts, "Tenebrae" and "Buddy's Monologue," have been recently performed.

As editor Radiclani Clytus makes clear in the volume's introductory essay, although Komunyakaa's poetry has its roots in the stylistic innovations of early twentieth-century American modernists, his writing often reflects his understanding that a "black" experience should not particularize the presentation of one's art. This volume, according to the editor, is an attempt to understand Komunyakaa's critical eclecticism within the context of his own words.

Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, Magic City, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1994.