Dien Cai Dau

The author of nine collections of poetry, Komunyakaa won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize for his book Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan, 1994). He has also been awarded the Thomas Forcade Award, the William Faulkner Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America.

Komunyakaa has taught at Indiana State University, Washington University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of New Orleans, and is currently Professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University.