First-Year Experience with Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian will speak about his 1997 memoir, Black Dog of Fate (an American son uncovers his Armenian past). Winner of the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir and a best book of the year for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Publisher’s Weekly, this moving and complex coming-of-age story follows the author’s discovery that members of his family were victims of the Armenian Genocide.

Balakian is the author of six books of poems, most recently Ziggurat and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000, and nonfiction works including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2004). His awards and civic citations include 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 for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio, and his work has been translated into Armenian, Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Dutch, Greek, German, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish.

He is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, a professor of English and director of creative writing at Colgate University. His memoir was chosen as the common reading this year for CLU’s First-Year Experience Seminar.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome.