Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 7:00pm PacificIn Person at UCLA, Mong Learning Center (Engineering VI Building), 404 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

RSVP for In Person here.

Promise Armenian Institute Distinguished Lecture Series

FEATURED SPEAKER
PETER BALAKIAN, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and author

Pulitzer Prize winning poet and author Peter Balakian will discuss how he has worked through filaments of Armenian history to create an inventive body of literature. He will explore how his work has moved across generations in his writing both poetry and memoir about the Armenian Genocide. How can a past historical event be transformed by the linguistic frequencies of literary imagination in the American present? Balakian will discuss how various family figures and ancestors have provided a grounding for his work; his great-great uncle, Krikoris Balakian (Bishop in the Armenian Church), was one of the 250 cultural leaders arrested on April 25, 1915 at the onset of the Genocide, and his grandmother Nafina Aroosian, who was a Genocide survivor along with her two young daughters, endured a harrowing death march into the Syrian desert.

Peter Balakian is the author of 8 books of poems and 4 books of prose and 3 collaborative translations and several edited books. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His prose books include Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture; Black Dog of Fate, a memoir—winner of the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir (a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His collaborative translation of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year.

Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Horanatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter); and The Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio, and his work has been translated into many languages and editions. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English at Colgate University.

Peter Balakian's books are available at the NAASR Bookstore.

Photo by Armin T. Wegner: Armenians being led away by armed guards from Harpoot, where the educated and the influential of the city were selected to be massacred at the nearest suitable site, May 1915.

CO-SPONSORS
Armenian Genocide Research Program at the Promise Armenian Institute
UCLA Promise Armenian Institute
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies
UCLA Department of Comparative Literature
Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law
Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA
Narekatsi Chair in Armenian Studies at UCLA
UCLA Working Group in Memory Studies
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
Ararat-Eskijian Museum

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