Peter Balakian was born in Teaneck and graduated from Dwight-Englewood School
New Jersey native Peter Balakian has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Balakian, 65, who grew up in Teaneck and Tenafly, wins for "Ozone Journal" (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), a book of poems that the Pulitzer board says "bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty."
The book's title poem centers on Balakian's experience excavating bones of victims of the Armenian genocide with a TV crew and weaves in other parts of his life -- "... We are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love," the Pulitzer Board writes of his work.
Balakian, an alumnus of the Englewood School for Boys, now Dwight-Englewood School, is director of creative writing and director of the Center for Ethics and World Societies at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., where he is also an English professor. In 2012, he won the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy and Tolerance.
Balakian, who has authored six other books of poetry, wins a $10,000 prize for the Pulitzer honor.
Another Pulitzer winner in the "Letters, Drama & Music" category this year is Lin-Manuel Miranda's widely praised musical "Hamilton."