Arthur Kayzakian Awarded for Poetry Collections To Be Published in 2023

Poet Arthur Kayzakian has been awarded the 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. The collection will be published in 2023 through Black Lawrence Press. 

The Book of Redacted Paintings is about navigating childhood memory through invasion, war, and migration, loosely based on Kayzakian’s own personal experiences of moving from Iran to the United States as a child. According to Kayzakian, the collection stemmed from “a combination of wishing I could paint the pieces I see in my head and the feeling of something torn out from within me due to a traumatic upbringing” (read the full article here). 

In 2021, Kayzakian also won the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition for his collection My Burning City, which was additionally a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize, Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, the C.D. Wright Prize, and the Black River Chapbook Competition. 

My Burning City is a poetry chapbook that deals with personal and state history. “I have been writing poems about the Iranian-Armenian experience, an identity that remains erased from Iranian and Armenian people since it falls between both selves as a race and culture. My history is a core element of my poetics,” says Kayzakian about his collection, which will be available for purchase in 2023 (read more here).

Kayzakian is a contributing editor at Poetry International and a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from several publications, including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, COUNTERCLOCK, Chicago Review, Nat. Brut, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Prairie Schooner. He is a board member and poetry director of the International Armenian Literary Alliance.

Listen to Kayzakian reading his poem “Anna Walinska” here.