ANN ARBOR, Mich. — On September 16, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian will give a reading of his poetry and discuss the impact of traumatic history on his work exploring the issue of the impact of history on the literary imagination and the transmission of trauma across generations. He will also discuss how his own ancestors have provided a grounding for his work. His double-great-uncle, Krikoris Balakian (Bishop in the Armenian Church), was one of the 250 cultural leaders arrested on April 24, 1915, and his grandmother Nafina Shekerlemdjian, was the sole survivor (with her infant daughters) of her family and endured a harrowing death march into the Syrian desert.
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.
The talk on September 16, will start at 6 p.m. at the Helmut Stern Auditorium Museum of Art.
Those who are interested can tune in remotely at https://umich.zoom.us/j/99080532632.
The event is sponsored by the Armenian Studies Center at the University of Michigan.
