Ozone Journal is a 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning work by Peter Balakian.
The title poem of Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of 54 short sections, "each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009." [1]
The long poem “Ozone Journal” is a sequel to Balakian's “A Train-Ziggurat Elegy” (2010). While excavating the remains of Armenian genocide survivors in the Syrian desert with a TV crew, the persona navigates his own memory of New York City in a decade (the 1980s) of crisis. Ozone Journal creates inventive lyrical insight in a global age of danger and uncertainty.
According to Bruce Smith, in this book "Balakian masterfully does the thing nobody else does which is to derange history into poetry, to make poetry painting, to make painting culture, to make culture living, and with a historical depth that finds the right experience in language." [2]
The Pulitzer board said that Balakian's poems “bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.” [3]
The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually for Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first presented in 1922, and is given for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, published during the preceding calendar year.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Musa Dagh is a mountain in the Hatay Province of Turkey. In 1915, it was the location of a successful Armenian resistance to the Armenian genocide, an event that inspired Franz Werfel to write the novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
Nancy Jean Kricorian is an American author of the novels Zabelle (1997) and Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her third novel All the Light There Was in March 2013.
Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
Grigoris Balakian, was a bishop of the Armenian Apostolic Church, in addition to being a survivor and memoirist of the Armenian genocide.
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response is a book written by Peter Balakian, and published in 2003. It details the Armenian genocide, the events leading up to it, and the events following it. In particular, Balakian focuses on the American response to the persecution and genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire from 1894 to 1923.
Daniel Varoujan was an Armenian poet of the early 20th century. At the age of 31, when he was reaching international stature, he was deported and murdered by the Young Turk government, as part of the officially planned and executed Armenian genocide.
Terrence Des Pres was an American writer and Holocaust scholar.
The Deir ez-Zor camps were concentration camps in the heart of the Syrian Desert in which many thousands of Armenian refugees were forced into death marches during the Armenian genocide. The United States vice-consul in Aleppo, Jesse B. Jackson, estimated that Armenian refugees, as far east as Deir ez-Zor and south of Damascus, numbered 150,000, all of whom were virtually destitute.
Jesse Benjamin Jackson was a United States consul and an important eyewitness to the Armenian genocide. He served as consul in Aleppo when the city was the junction of many important deportation routes. Jackson concluded that the policies towards the Armenians were "without doubt a carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race." He considered the "wartime anti-Armenian measures" to be a "gigantic plundering scheme as well as a final blow to extinguish the race." By September 15, 1915, Jackson estimated that a million Armenians had been killed and deemed his own survival a "miracle". After the Armenian Genocide, Jackson led a relief effort and was credited with saving the lives of "thousands of Armenians."
During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire, led at the time by the Young Turks, the Turkish armed forces, militias, and members of the public engaged in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape against female Armenians and children of both sexes. Before the genocide had begun, one method used to intimidate the Armenian population was sexual humiliation. Women and young girls were not only subjected to rape, but also forced marriage, torture, forced prostitution, slavery and sexual mutilation.
Armen Dorian was a renowned Armenian poet, teacher, and editor who lived in the Ottoman Empire. He studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. He wrote poetry in French and Armenian. In 1915, Dorian was arrested and killed during the Armenian genocide at the age of 23.
Balakian is an Armenian surname. It may refer to:
Armenian Golgotha is a memoir written by Grigoris Balakian about his eyewitness account of the Armenian genocide. The memoir was released in two volumes. Volume 1, about his life prior to and during the Armenian genocide, was released in 1922. Volume 2, about his life as a fugitive after the Genocide, was released in 1959. Originally published in Armenian, the memoir was later published in various languages including an English translation by Peter Balakian, Balakian's great-nephew, with Aris Sevag.
Diane Seuss is an American poet and educator. Her book frank: sonnets won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2022.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
Sona Ter-Hovhannisyan, best known by the pen name Sona Van, is an Armenian American poet. She is recognized for her work addressing the Armenian genocide.