Reetika Vazirani: 1962-2003

Though Reetika Vazirani was just six when she and her family came to the United States in 1968, the imaginative power of her native India and the enduring aftershocks of immigration shaped her creative life. In her poetry and essays, as well as in her friendships and values, she navigated powerful cultural crosscurrents. Both the New World and the Old, seen through Vazirani's clear gaze, could prove alluring and heartbreaking.

Her family settled in Silver Spring, Maryland, where her father, an oral surgeon, became assistant dean at Howard University's dental school. After his suicide when Vazirani was nearly twelve, her mother returned to school and became a lawyer to support the family. The second of five children, young Vazirani was a reader but not yet a writer. When she left home for Wellesley College in 1980, she intended to follow her father's admonitions and study medicine. Hearing Derek Walcott read from "The Schooner Flight" changed her mind.

After graduation, a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship allowed her to return to India, then travel through China, Japan, and Thailand. Vazirani worked briefly as a translator at a Washington bank, but soon decamped to Boston to audit Walcott's creative writing classes at Boston University, study Indian literature with A.K. Ramanujan at Harvard, and take courses in Hindi.

In the late 1980s, she started submitting her poems to literary journals. A trickle of her work had appeared in Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, and The Literary Review by 1992. A few years later, she was publishing in Agni, the Antioch Review, Ploughshares, the Partisan Review and The Nation. She was encouraged by her acceptance at several writers' programs and workshops—first Yaddo, then Sewanee, later Bread Loaf.

The awards that followed brought Vazirani to the attention of a wider audience. She won a "Discovery"/ The Nation Award in 1994 and the 1995 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, which led to the publication of her first volume of poetry, White Elephants (Beacon Press, 1996). It explored what Marilyn Hacker, who selected her for the prize, called in her introduction "the richness and confusion, the music, the flavors, the constant questioning of a genuinely multicultural existence." Vazirani went on to win a Pushcart Prize and awards from Prairie Schooner and Poets & Writers, among others; several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2000, included her work.

She received an MFA from the University of Virginia in 1997, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and studied with Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, and Charles Wright. "She came to our program as a poet who was going to make it, regardless," Dove has said. "It was just a question of how fast."

Vazirani went on to Sweet Briar College, where she was writer-in-residence from 1998 to 2001. She also taught at the University of Oregon, the College of New Jersey, and Bennington College, and became a permanent faculty member at the Callaloo Writing Workshops. During the 2002-2003 academic year, she was writer-in-residence at The College of William & Mary.

Her second book of poems, World Hotel (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), continued to investigate immigrants' lives and other variants of contemporary rootlessness. It won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, given to works that contribute to the understanding of racism or the appreciation of cultural diversity. She completed her third volume last year; Copper Canyon hopes to publish it in 2005.

Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa, Vazirani's child with Yusef Komunyakaa, was born in December 2000, and was probably the youngest person to attend the Callaloo workshops. Vazirani called him, in a letter to Rita Dove, "a total joybird."

Vazirani and Komunyakaa, who were not married, had both accepted appointments at Emory University, to begin in September 2004. But last July, while house-sitting in Washington, D.C., Vazirani took her life and that of her son. Jehan was two and a half. Vazirani was about to turn forty-one. They have been memorialized at gatherings in Washington, Trenton, Bennington, and Williamsburg; in poems written by both...