William E. Morgan Alumni Achievement Award

Yusef Komunyakaa (M.A., English, ’81)

Yusef Komunyakaa was born April 29, 1947, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and raised during the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969-1970 during the Vietnam War and was a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross, which earned him a Bronze Star.

He began writing poetry in 1973 and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs in 1975. His first book of poems, Dedications & Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977, followed by Lost in the Bonewheel Factory in 1979. He earned his M.A. in English from Colorado State University in 1981, and an M.F.A. from University of California, Irvine. In 2015, Yusef was selected as CSU’s 2015 College of Liberal Arts Honor Alumnus.

In 1984, Komunyakaa began to receive wider attention when he published Copacetic, a collection of poems that showcased how his poetry was influenced by jazz. That collection was followed by I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head that won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau, which is considered by many to be some of the finest writing on the Vietnam War and earned him the Dark Room Poetry Prize.

In 1994, Yusef received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977-1989. That publication also earned him the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

As both a jazz and soldier poet, Yusef has rejected the idea that you should write only what you know and prefers to write what you are willing to discover, stating “Be inquisitive, and not just for the sake of information … but because I do think that it keeps us connected to who we are. Life is celebration and confrontation, the same as poetry.”

Beyond poetry, Yusef’s prose includes Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, as well as Gilgamesh: A Verse Play and the libretto for Slip Knot. He served as coeditor for The Jazz Poetry Anthology, was co-translator for The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu, and was guest editor for The Best of American Poetry 2003.

Yusef’s other awards and honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, Thomas Forcade Award, Hanes Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1999, Yusef became the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His teaching credits include the University of New Orleans, Indiana University, and Princeton University. Yusef currently lives in New York City where he is a distinguished senior poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.

About the award: Named for the eighth president of the University, Dr. William E. Morgan, this award is the highest honor given by the Alumni Association and is reserved for individuals who have excelled at the national or international level. The purpose of this award is to recognize a graduate who has attained extraordinary distinction and success in their field of endeavor and whose achievements have brought credit to CSU and benefited their fellow citizens.