Poet Named in Apparent Murder-Suicide
A prize-winning poet who used verse to describe her experiences as a child and as an Indian immigrant was identified by D.C. police yesterday as the woman who apparently slashed the left wrist of her 2-year-old son and her own Wednesday and then died with him....
Reetika Vazirani, 40, and Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa were found lying next to each other in the dining room of a house in the Chevy Chase section of Washington, where Vazirani was house-sitting.
Police called the deaths an apparent murder-suicide, but no official ruling has been made. Investigators found a note with references to the boy's father, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, according to sources familiar with the investigation....
Vazirani's editor described her as a warm, intelligent person whose poems explored the two worlds that immigrants inhabit. Her work was published in several poetry journals in addition to her books, and she was active in creative writing circles. She won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her second book, "World Hotel," and a Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first, "White Elephants," published in 1996.
According to friends, Vazirani came to this country from India when she was about 6... Samples of her poetry describe life in India and in the United States and the impact of immigration on her family. In one poem, "Memory I," she wrote, "He grew strange, my father, caught between two accents and two worlds." ...
Vazirani was a writer-in-residence last year at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Later this year, she and Komunyakaa were to join the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta...
Some links to poems by Reetika Vazirani:
Three Poems
Saris of Kasturiya
Ploughshares magazine several poems
A web chapbook from The Literary Review
What she said to him about the myths they figured in
The Poetry Center at Smith College - several poems
The Virginia Quarterly Review two poems
The Academy of American Poets - links to several poems
Weber Studies - several poems
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