Literary Lights 2026 Launch: Featuring Peter Balakian

Join us for the launch of Literary Lights 2026 featuring Peter Balakian, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of New York Trilogy, in conversation with writer, critic, editor and translator, Diana Arterian. The virtual event will take place on February 8, 2026, at 10:00 AM Pacific | 1:00 PM Eastern | 10:00 PM Armenia time. Watch the recording.

In an inventive, elliptical language, New York Trilogy explores one man’s journey from the late 1960s to the twenty-first century, as he moves through a series of experiences centered in New York City and the surrounding New Jersey Palisades. Throughout this long poem in three parts, the protagonist’s life is impacted by historical events including the Armenian Genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, the attacks of September 11th, the US war in Iraq, and the climate crisis.

Comprised of three multi-sequence poems originally included in Peter Balakian’s collections No Sign, Ozone Journal, and Ziggurat, the sections of New York Trilogy come together to form a poetry that embraces interior and aesthetic experiences, celebrates human intimacy, and bears witness to history. The historical power and psychological depth of Balakian’s work expands on the tradition of the American long poem with a lyrical narrative that weaves intimate personal moments into the vastness of shared history.

Praise for the Book

“[A] single personal epic. . . . Balakian, like many in his generation of ‘witness’ poets (Carolyn Forché, Lawrence Joseph), splits the difference between poetry’s compression and journalism’s immediacy . . . The operational mode is the collage, a series of images and phrases, akin to montage in film; the language, we might say, is ‘clipped.’ And as in journalism, the poet reports with little editorializing, letting the images speak for themselves.” – New York Review of Books

“Rippling with large energy, ambitious in its reach, and gratifying in its etched-in personal glimpses, New York Trilogy shuttles us through history, from a dig in Mesopotamia to the catastrophes of our time. Ingesting calamity, it breaks the language into fresh syncopations. So idioms change and advance. The Trilogy is a feat of contemporary witness, its multiple refractions brought to account in the self of the poet. This is how we integrate fragmentation in our time, and how, after hard passage, we look to transcend.” – Sven Birkerts, author of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

Peter Balakian is the author of nine books of poems including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ozone Journal. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response was a New York Times bestseller. Balakian’s work has been translated into many languages, and he teaches at Colgate University.

Diana Arterian is the author of the recent poetry collection Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and editor and co-translator of Smoke Drifts (World Poetry Books, 2025), a collection of Nadia Anjuman’s poetry. Diana’s first collection, Playing Monster :: Seiche, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a Poetry Foundation Staff Pick. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press and twice-finalist for the National Poetry Series, Diana’s creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Millay Arts, Yaddo, and others. Her work has been featured widely, including at The Academy of American Poets, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, New York Times Book Review, and Poetry Magazine. Diana holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and is the 2026 Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor at San José State University. She writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at Lit Hub and lives in Los Angeles.

Literary Lights 2026is our fourth annual reading series showcasing new works of literature by Armenian authors, cohosted with the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event—held online or in-person—will feature a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Learn more and read along with the series by purchasing titles at our Bookshop.org storefront.

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