Peter Balakian: “Poetry, Traumatic History, Memory: Thinking about the Armenian Genocide.”

Peter Balakian is an award winning poet, author and translator. HisOzone Journalwas awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Most recently he has published a book of poems,New York Trilogy(2025), that moves between decades of tumultuous life in New York City and the politics of the Middle East. Balakian’s poems have appeared widely in leading magazines and journals including,The New Yorker: 100 Years of Poetry. His prose books range fromVice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, poetry, art and culture, toBlack 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). Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes amongst them: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Khorenatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is the Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English at Colgate University.