Peter Balakian
Peter Balakian is the author of 7 books of poems including Ziggurat (2010) and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (2001) and Ozone Journal (2015). His prose books include Vise and Shadow: Selected Essays on Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture (2015), The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2004), won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times and national Best Seller. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir, and was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition. He is co-translator of Girgoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, (Knopf, 2009), which was a Washington Post book of the year.
He is also the author of a book on the American poet Theodore Roethke and the co translator of the Armenian poet Siamanto’s Bloody News From My Friend. Between 1976-1996 he edited with Bruce Smith the poetry journal Graham House Review. He is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations including a Moves Khoranatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Anahit Literary Prize. He has appeared widely on national television and radio( 60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight, PBS, Charlie Rose, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, Fresh Air, etc) , and his work have appeared in a many languages including Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Dutch, Greek, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Turkish.
Born and raised in Teaneck and Tenafly, New Jersey, Balakian holds a BA from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University, where he has taught since 1980. He was the first Director of Colgate’s Center For Ethics and World Societies.