W.D. Snodgrass, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a nearly 40-year teaching career, died Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y., of lung cancer.
Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960 for his first book, “Heart’s Needle,” which grew from the heartbreak of losing custody of his daughter in a bitter divorce.
Although widely credited as a founding member of the “confessional” school of poetry, Snodgrass himself dismissed the label.
He wrote more than 30 books of poetry and translations.
Sarah Booth Conroy, 81, who chronicled the homes, history and changing personalities of the Washington elite as a Washington Post reporter, editor and columnist for more than three decades, died Monday at a nursing facility in Potomac, Md. She had Alzheimer’s disease.
Conroy, who wrote more than 2,800 articles for the Post, was known for her adept reporting on the city’s diplomatic circuit and for her long- running “Chronicles” column about the city’s history.
Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar, 81, one of the leading mambo dancers of the 1950s, died Tuesday in Miami, said Barbara Craddock, his longtime dance partner.
Craddock described his cause of death as heart failure but said it could be related to Aguilar’s diabetes.
Aguilar was born in Puerto Rico in 1927 and grew up in New York City, where he picked up the nickname “Cuban Pete” in 1949 at the Palladium Ballroom. The nickname referenced a Desi Arnaz song.
