https://creees.stanford.edu/events/poetry-traumatic-history-memory-thinking-about-armenian-genocide
Location
Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm. 123
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. He will discuss how his ancestors have provided a grounding for his work including his great-great uncle, Krikoris Balakian (Bishop in the Armenian Church), who was one of the 250 cultural leaders arrested on April 25, 1915 at the onset of the Genocide, and his grandmother Nafina Shekerlemdjian, who was a Genocide survivor along with her two young daughters, enduring a harrowing death march into the Syrian desert.
Peter Balakian is the author of 9 books of poems, 4 books of prose, 3 collaborative translations and several edited books. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and his new book of poems is New York Trilogy. His poems have appeared widely in the leading magazines and journals in English for decades. His prose books include Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture; 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); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His collaborative translation of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year.
Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Horanatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy and The Emily Clark Balch Prize from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio and his work has been translated into many languages and editions and most recently into Tamil in 2025. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English at Colgate University.