India-born poet Reetika Vazirani and her two-year-old son were found dead with their wrists slashed at their house in a posh section of the US capital.

Vazirani, who used verse to describe her experience as a child and as an Indian immigrant was staying with her son Jehan for the summer in the the Chevy Chase home of her friend and novelist Howard Norman and poet Jane Shore, who are spending the summer at their home in Vermont.

Police have found a note from the scene with references to the boy's father, Pulitzer prize winning poet and Princeton University professor Yusef Komunyakaa.

Police called the deaths an apparent murder-suicide, pending an official ruling, The Washington Post reported quoting sources.

Neighbours and friends told reporters that there had been signs that Vazirani was distraught.
 
The day before the incident, the poetess had a meeting with a neighbourhood catholic priest and borrowed a Bible from
a neighbour.

Komunyakaa could not be reached and relatives in the area refused to comment.

Vazirani's first book White Elephants fetched her a Barnard New Women Poet Prize in 1996 and her second book World Hotel won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf-Book Award.

Percival D'Silva, a priest at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, whom Vazirani met a day before her death, said, "She was distraught."

A friend said Vazirani had spoken to her about personal problems, some involving her relationship with Prof Komunyakaa.

But Denise King-Miller said Vazirani had come to dinner on Monday and seemed upbeat. "Her conversation with me was really about how she was going to move forward."

Before 8 a.m. (local time) on Wednesday, King-Miller said, Vazirani left her a voice mail saying, "I think I'm going to hurt myself."

King-Miller said she got the message later and began calling Vazirani every hour but got no answer.

Also that day, a police source told the Post, Vazirani left a voice mail for another friend saying, "I'm having a kind of emergency now, and I wanted to make sure you could let yourself in."

The friend visited the house before 4.30 p.m. and found the bodies lying parallel to one another on the floor with two large kitchen knives nearby.

Mother and son appeared to have been dead for hours, one source familiar with the scene told the paper.

Shore said on Wednesday by phone that her family was still in Vermont and knew little about what had happened in their Washington home. "We feel just horrible."

Vazirani's editor described her as a warm, intelligent person whose poems explored the two worlds that immigrants inhabit.

"She's truly an international, lyrical poet, an accomplished lyrical story-teller," said Sam Hamill, whose Copper Canyon Press published Vazirani's second book.

"She wrote about being in both cultures and between both cultures."

"Vazirani definitely was one of the writers to watch," said E Ethelbert Miller, King-Miller's husband and director of the African American Resource Centre at Howard University.

"She was really representing the new Indian voice, in dealing with the issue of finding one's place, or home after immigration."

Vazirani was a writer-in-residence last year at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.

Later this year, she and Komunyakaa were to join the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta.

"This is a terrible loss for all of us at Emory, as well as the world of poetry," said Jim Grimsley, director of the university's creative writing programme.