About Author
Yusef Komunyakaa's twelve books of poems include Taboo, Warhorses, Talking Dirty to the Gods, and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Komunyakaa first received wide recognition following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences. He followed the book with two others: I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry
