Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a small industrial town 70 miles north of New Orleans, and grew up under Jim Crow in the conservative, rural American South. The bookish son of an illiterate carpenter, his access to literature was limited, but he read everything he could get his hands on. He recalls listening avidly to jazz and blues on the radio, reading encyclopedias and the Bible cover-to-cover, and checking out James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name from a Black church’s library 25 times. Absorbed by the power of language and music, as a child, he wanted to be a preacher. His early exposure to music would have a lasting effect on the musicality of his poetry.
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