Watch: Break the Silence: A Reading for Artsakh

Peter Balakian, who is a IALA advisory board member, is the author of seven books of poems most recently Ozone Journal, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as Ziggurat (2010) and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (2001). His four books of prose include The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2004), 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 was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition. He is co-translator of Girgoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, (Knopf, 2009), which was a Washington Post book of the year.

Ilya Kaminsky

Poet, critic, translator and educator

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins), In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine (Arrowsmith), and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book, and was also named Best Book of the Year by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.

Siranush Sargsyan

Journalist

Sargsyan is a Stepanakert-based freelance journalist covering human rights, politics, conflict and post-conflict environments. She regularly publishes in regional and international outlets, including Newsweek, the Armenian Weekly and IWPR. See the piece Sargysan read during the event here.

Lika (Anzhelika) Zakaryan was born in 1994 in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh. She studied at the Department of Political Science of Artsakh State University and holds a master’s degree. She then graduated from the Peace Work Institute, where she studied in-depth conflict management and peace-building methods. In 2018-2019 she worked at the Montesori School in Würzburg, Germany, as a coach on conflicts and peace-building. Returning to Artsakh, she started working for the Armenian media outlet CivilNet, in the team working for Artsakh. During the war, she started to keep and post her diary, in which she wrote about the war and the people caught up in it. The diary became widely read and loved by people around the world, and remains a definitive chronicle of those forty-four days.

Chris McCabe

Poet, editor, novelist, and Head Librarian at London’s National Poetry Library

Chris McCabe’s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and he is the editor of several anthologies including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. He is working on an epic series of psychogeographical books documenting the lost poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, the latest of which is Buried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery. He works at the National Poetry Library in his role as National Poetry Librarian.

Syuzanna Margaryan

Economist and journalist

Lusine Vanyan

Writer