Peter Balakian

Pulitzer Prize-winner Peter Balakian is the author of seven books of poems, four books of prose, and two translations. His poems have been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad for over four decades and his memoir was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly.

Working from a form of poetics he calls “writing horizontal,” Balakian’s poetry engages a wide range of realities including genocide, war, terrorism, climate change, AIDS epidemic, historical trauma and memory as well as the personal domains of love, death, art, and culture. His is a sensuous language: personal and cosmopolitan, elliptical and cadence-jolted, sharp and textured, such that the language itself becomes its own force of discovery and meaning. In his poetry and prose, social and political forces shape the self while at the same time enveloping an American grain and the reverberations of historical memory. Balakian is a major American voice, a poet and writer who is able to engage the discordant realities of contemporary life in all its starkness and difficulty—as well as in its moments of revelation, beauty, and resilience.

Ozone Journal, his most recent poetry collection, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. In 2016, the Republic of Armenia awarded Balakian with the 2016 Presidential Medal and, in 2007 the Movses Khorenatsi Medal. Other prizes and awards and civic citations include a Guggenheim Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Virginia Quarterly Review; PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir; the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best book in English on the subject of genocide and human rights’ and the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy.