Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Balakian, Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and Professor of English, has authored a travel memoir for the New York Times.
The piece is now available to read online, and it is slated to run with additional photography in the print edition of the Sunday New York Times this weekend.
Balakian taps into the heart of his ancestral homeland in the piece, titled “My Armenia.”
“My travels frequently take me beyond Yerevan,” he writes. “Wherever you go in Armenia, you are journeying through an open-air museum where churches and monasteries, even a Hellenic temple, are built into the cliffs or perched at the edges of canyons or green gorges, with searing vistas framed by the ever-blue sky. Thousand-year-old lace-like carved stone crosses (khatchgars) emerge from fields of roadside poppies.”
Balakian is author of seven books of poetry, including Ozone Journal, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Other poetry collections include Ziggurat (2010) and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (2001). His work also includes numerous volumes of prose and the memoir Black Dog of Fate, which 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.