Book Discussion | Veterans and Pulitzer Prize Winners Henry Threadgill and Yusef Komunyakaa in Conversation

This event celebrates the publication of Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the autobiography of composer and multi-instrumentalist Henry Threadgill, co-written with Columbia University professor Brent Hayes Edwards. The evening will feature a reading and conversation with Threadgill and the poet Yusef Komunyakaa, the two Black Vietnam veterans who have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as they reflect upon their experiences in the war and its impact on their long careers as artists.

A copy of Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music will be available for purchase.

About the Participants
Henry Threadgill has performed on more than thirty albums, including acclaimed releases from his bands Air, X-75, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, Very Very Circus, Make a Move, Zooid, and Ensemble Double Up. His awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003; a United States Artist Fellowship in 2008; a Doris Duke Artist Award in 2016; and the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award in 2016. Threadgill’s four-movement work, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016, and in 2021 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. Threadgill's most recent album is The Other One.

Yusef Komunyakaa's numerous books of poems include Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth: New and Selected Poems (2021); The Emperor of Water, Clocks (2015); Warhorses (2008); Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), which was awarded the Dark Room Poetry Prize; and Copacetic (1984). His essays and interviews are collected in Blue Notes (2000) and Condition Red (2017). Komunyakaa co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and he also wrote the libretto for T. J. Anderson’s opera Slip Knot (2001). His honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999-2005, and was Distinguished Senior Poet in the NYU Creative Writing Program, where he retired in 2021.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center. In 2022-23 he is one of the three inaugural Ford Foundation Scholars-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 Edwards was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003).