Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian (Armenian Փիթեր Բալաքյան, born 1951 ) is an Armenian- American writer and scholar. He grew up in Teaneck and Tenafly, New Jersey, and received his BA in 1973 from Bucknell University. In 1980 he received a Ph.D. from Brown University in American civilization. Peter Balakian now teaches at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, where he ' Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar' Chair holds as Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English.

Balakians memoir Black Dog of Fate (1997) was published in 2000 in German under the title The dogs from Ararat. In it, he describes his youth in a typical American suburban settlement in New Jersey. It was late, the author was aware of his Armenian identity and explored gradually the story of his ancestors from the Ottoman Empire, which had become almost all the victims of the Armenian genocide. The book describes this process of awareness and there by the poignant portrayal of the family fortune a harrowing portrayal of the genocide of 1915. Was in the U.S. awarded among others with the Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir of the PEN.

In 2003, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. This non-fiction book is a comprehensive presentation of the Armenian genocide, based essentially on the U.S. sources. At the same theme Balakian the broad human rights movement in the United States that formed in the 1890s in the aftermath of the Hamidian massacres and until the 1920s, mustered millions of dollars in aid for the persecuted Armenians. - The Burning Tigris received the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize as the best book on the subject of genocide in the last two years.

Peter Balakian was first known as the author of books of poetry. His most recent publication June -tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. In Armenia, he was in 2005 by the Armenian Apostolic Catholicos Karekin II received the Surp Surp Mesrop - Sahag - Order.

A prominent member of the family is the Bishop Balakian Krikor Balakian ( great-uncle of Peter Balakian ), who was among the arrested in Istanbul on April 24, 1915 Armenian leaders; he was deported along with Komitas Vardapet and about 400 other intellectuals, artists and dignitaries after Çankırı, but managed to escape and reported later in the book Haj Goghgotan ( Armenian Golgotha ​​) about his experiences during the genocide. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag translated this important testimony about the genocide of the Armenian into English. It is published in 2009.

Works

  • Father Fisheye (1979 )
  • Sad Days of Light ( 1983)
  • Reply From Wilderness Iceland (1988 )
  • Dyer's Thistle (1996 )
  • June - Tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (2001)
  • Ziggurat (2010)
  • Theodore Roethke 's Far Fields ( 1989)
  • The dogs from Ararat (1997)
  • The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response ( 2003)
  • Armenian Golgotha ​​(2009)
  • Bloody News From My Friend, by Siamanto, translated Nevart Yaghlian, introduction of Balakian (1996 )
  • Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, Preface by Robert Jay Lifton, Introduction by Roger Smith, afterword by Henry Morgenthau III. (2003)
  • Limited Editions (all from The Press of Appletree Alley, Lewisburg, PA)
  • Declaring Generations, linoleum engravings by Barnard Taylor ( 1981)
  • Invisible Estate, woodcuts by Rosalyn Richards ( 1985)
  • The Oriental Rug, linoleum engravings by Barnard Taylor ( 1986)

Recordings

  • Poetry on Record, 1888-2006: . 98 Poets Read Their Work ( Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats, through Modernism to present Four - CD set Balakian reads "The History of Armenia".
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