Two men with Bogalusa ties were featured recently in the New York Times newspaper and its associated products.

On Nov. 29, the Times published an obituary for Dr. Gerald Berenson, the founder of the Bogalusa Heart Study. Berenson passed away Nov. 22 in Houston, Texas, at the age of 96.

The published obituary included a statement from Dr. Larry Hollier, the chancellor of Louisiana State University Health.

“What he learned from Bogalusa school children influenced the well-being of people the world over,” Hollier said, of Berenson.

Berenson’s death was reported in the weekend, Nov. 24-25, 2018, edition of The Daily News.

On Nov. 30, T: The New York Times Style Magazine published an online feature detailing “Black Male Writers four Our Time.” Among the men featured was Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was born in Bogalusa in 1947.

A total of 32 writers were featured in the story, including four from Louisiana.

Komunyakaa currently lives in New York City and is a Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program. He is perhaps best known for his poetry collection “Neon Venacular,” which published in 1993 and earned him the Pulitzer Prize. The collection features imagery about jazz and blues music and other aspects of Southern life.

He has also written many other collections, including “Dien Cai Dau,” which published in 1988 and is about his experience in the Vietnam War; “Warhorses” in 2008 and “The Emperor of Water Clocks” in 2015. A 1992 collection of Komunyakaa’s poems was titled “Magic City.”

Other Louisiana men in the feature were novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin of New Orleans, poet Rickey Laurentiis of New Orleans, and poet Jericho Brown of Shreveport.