station of the New York City Subway. According to the Associated Press report, the officer claimed that Dumas had been threatening another man with a knife. The officer said that he ordered Dumas to drop the knife, but that Dumas instead turned, attacked the officer, and slashed the officer's cheek. The officer stated that he fired three times. The circumstances of the shooting remain unclear as no witnesses testified and no records remain since the Transit Police Department's records of the shooting were destroyed when the agency merged into the New York City Police Department in 1995. Dumas's death is often called "a case of mistaken identity". Dumas was buried in Long Island National Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York. His death is mentioned in the poem "An Alphabet of My Dead," by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, as well as the poem "Night, for Henry Dumas" by Aracelis Girmay. Posthumous recognition A limited amount of Dumas's work was published during his lifetime in several small magazines and journals in the 1960s. It was mainly through the efforts of Eugene B. Redmond, the executor of Dumas's literary estate, that various collections of his work have been published. Poetry for My People was first published in 1970 by Southern Illinois University Press, where Dumas worked before his death. Toni Morrison, then working as an editor at Random House, read Poetry for My People and used her influence to have Random House publish two collections of Dumas's published and unpublished writings in 1974, Play Ebony, Play Ivory, which was a reprint of Poetry for my People, and Ark of Bones. To generate interest in Dumas, Morrison hosted a book launch party on October 13, 1974. In her invitation, Morrison said of Dumas's work that it was "some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read." When Play Ebony, Play Ivory appeared in 1974, Julius Lester, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Dumas "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties." In 1976, Dumas's short story "Thalia" was awarded the Black Scholar's literary award by James Baldwin. Poet Eugene Redmond, Dumas's literary executor and editor, helped renew interest in Dumas in 1988 with the publication of the short story anthology, Goodbye Sweetwater, which contained both previously published and new works. Redmond released a second anthology, Knees of a Natural Man, in