Balakian to Be Honored by Prelacy for Pulitzer Prize June 27

NEW YORK—Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan and the Executive Councils of the Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church will hold a reading and reception in honor of Peter Balakian, acclaimed writer and winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, on Mon., June 27, at 7 p.m., at Pashalian Hall, St. Illuminator’s Cathedral, 221 East 27th Street, New York City.

Khachig Tololyan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wesleyan University, will introduce the honoree’s work and will comment on his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ozone Journal”; Balakian will also read from his prize-winning book. A reception will follow the presentation. Signed copies of “Ozone Journal” will be available. Readers may RSVP to the Prelacy by calling (212) 689-7810.

Writing in Tikkun, the poet David Wojahn wrote: “Few American poets of the boomer generation have explored the interstices of public and personal history as deeply and urgently as has Balakian. … [H]is project of ‘writing horizontal’ attempts to find within the pitiless hubbub of contemporary consciousness those essential recollections (what Wordsworth termed ‘spots of time’) that are the sources of selfhood and to devise a new method for meaningfully confronting and memorializing the past. ” Keith Jones in Consequence Magazine notes that “Balakian is a master of the drifting, split-second mirage, the cinematic dissolve and cross-cut as well as the sculptural, statuesque moment chiseled out of consonant blends and an imagistic, jazzman’s ear for vowels…beautiful, haunting, plaintive, urgent, in our dying world’s age, these poems legislate a vital comportment to the demands of our shared present, timely and untimely both.”

Balakian is the author of seven books of poems, four books of prose, and two collaborative translations. He holds the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Chair in the Humanities at Colgate University.

Source: Armenian Weekly Mid-Atlantic