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As the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaches, ������Ƶ professor Peter Balakian, a prize winning and internationally distinguished writer whose work
has been translated into many languages, explores the aftermath of 9/11
in his new book of poems, Ziggurat (University of Chicago Press).

Balakian will also appear on
���ʸ�’s on Sept. 11 and a poem from Ziggurat
will be the on PBS’s The NewsHour website on Sept. 7.

“I think a poet’s voice can be a contribution to the national
conversation about 9/11,” said Balakian, Constance H. and Donald M.
Rebar Professor in the Humanities and professor of English.

In Ziggurat, which will
be published Sept. 11, he wrestles with the reverberations of 9/11
through a lens of personal memory, history, and myth.

As a mail runner in downtown
Manhattan in the late ’60s and ’70s, Balakian, a New Jersey native, worked
inside and around the World Trade Center.

“This is a book about New York: the New York I knew when the twin towers were built in the late sixties, and the New York I saw when the towers fell,” he noted.

A group of poems about the Towers won the Emily
Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review.

The poem creates a mosaic of
perspectives in which Balakian sees the towers as monument, a shifting
symbol of capitalism, a simple workplace, and an imaginative zone of
light, sound, and vision.

Ziggurat is Balakian’s
first poetry collection since June-Tree: New and Selected Poems,
which Library Journal noted as “one of the most significant
poetry collections of 2001.”

Balakian, director of creative
writing at ������Ƶ, is the author of nine books including The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, a New York
Times notable book and best seller. His memoir Black Dog of Fate
won the PEN/Albrand Prize and was a New York Times notable book.