Magic City

Yusef Komunyakaa (born in Bogalusa, Louisiana) is one of the major American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, known for the musical richness of his verse and its engagement with jazz, Vietnam, race, and Southern Black experience. He served in the Vietnam War and worked as a military journalist. His collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the William Faulkner Prize. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He is a professor at New York University. His other major collections include Dien Cai Dau (1988) and Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000).