How can a past historical event be transformed by literature that comes after? Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian will discuss the impact of the Armenian Genocide on his work. He will explore the transmission of trauma across generations and how poetry’s resources can ingest the past. Balakian examines how his ancestors have provided a grounding for his work, ancestors like his great-great uncle, Krikoris Balakian (Bishop in the Armenian Church), one of the 250 cultural leaders arrested on April 24, 1915, and his grandmother, Nafina Shekerlemdjian who along with her two young daughters survived the Genocide enduring a harrowing death march into the Syrian desert.

Peter Balakian is an award winning poet, author and translator. His Ozone Journal was 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 from Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, poetry, art and culture, to 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). 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.

https://umich.zoom.us/j/99080532632

Cosponsors: Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies, Department of Middle East Studies, Department of English Language and Literature, and National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)

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