Peter Balakian is the author of eight books: most recently June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly. He is also the author of a book on the American poet Theodore Roethke and the co-translator of the Armenian poet Siamanto’s Bloody News From My Friend. Between 1976-1996 he edited with Bruce Smith the poetry journal Graham House Review. He is the recipient of many awards, prizes and civic citations, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the Ahanhit Literary Prize. He has appeared widely on national television and radio, and foreign editions of his work have appeared in Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Dutch Greek, German, Italian and Turkish.

The Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Colgate University, he was the first Director of Colgate’s Center For Ethics and World Societies.