Washington, July 18
NRI prize-winning poet Reetika Vazirani kills self and child. The bodies of Vairani, 40, and her son Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa were found next to each other in a pool of blood in the Chevy Chase area here.

She won a Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her 1996 book "White Elephants", and the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her second book "World Hotel".

Reetika Vazirani was born in India in 1962, emigrated to the United States in 1968, and raised in Maryland. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1984, she received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for travel and study in India, Thailand, Japan, and China. She received her M.F.A from the University of Virginia where she was a Hoyns Fellow.
She is a recipient of a Discovery/The Nation Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, the Glenna Luschei/Prairie Schooner Award for her essay, The Art of Breathing, which appears in the anthology How We Live our Yoga (Beacon 2001). She has been a Contributing and Advisory Editor for Shenandoah and was the guest poetry editor of two issues. She is currently a Book Review Editor for Callaloo and a Senior Poetry Editor of the new journal, Catamaran, featuring work by artists from South Asia. She has translated poems from Urdu. Her work has been translated into Italian.

She lives with her family, the writer Yusef Komunyakaa, and their son. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.

In her own words:

"Culture shock is not your reflex upon leaving the dock; it is when you have been a law-abiding citizen for more than ten years: when someone asks your name and the name of your religion and your first thought is I don't know..."
'World Hotel' was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book award in 2003, for books that explore the richness of human diversity.

She is the author of two books:

White Elephants. Beacon Press, 1996.
World Hotel. Copper Canyon, 2002.
Reetika Vazirani died with her young son on 18 July, 2003. [Rediff news report]


Her own writing
Four (a poem)