Yusef Komunyakaa Birthplace

Born James Willie Brown Jr. in Bogalusa in 1947, Yusef Komunyakaa won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His collection Magic City is a lyric memoir of growing up Black in Bogalusa during the civil rights era — the sawmill ghosts, the racial terror, the music coming through walls, the specific light of a Louisiana boyhood under threat. He is one of the most significant American poets of his generation, and the city that made him is this one: the company town built on logged-out forest, where the civil rights movement turned violent outside his front door.