So I Will Till the Ground
In his fifth collection of poetry, Gregory Djanikian confronts the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the diaspora that ensued, sending survivors to all parts of the world. By turns sorrowful and redemptive, the poems go on to record the author’s boyhood in Egypt, his eventual emigration to the United States and a wholly different culture—and a life, however new, lived always under the haunting shadow of the 1915 cataclysm.
His poems also investigate how language, especially the American idiom, is enriched or reinvented. He has a keen ear for what he calls the “unexpected syntactic constructions” and “surprising turns of phrase” that immigrants contribute to English.
Gregory Djanikian was born of Armenian parentage in 1949 in Alexandria, Egypt, and came to the United States when he was 8 years old. He has published five collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon University Press: The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, and most recently, So I Will Till the Ground. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and in many anthologies and textbooks. Djanikian is Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1983.
He is the winner of numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the Friends of Literature Award from Poetry magazine and the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center of Columbia University.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1799
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_djanikian.html
http://www.cortlandreview.com/authors.php?search=djanikian
The Savannah Book Festival is a non-profit organization that hosts an annual, weekend-long festival of the written and spoken word, February 18-20, 2011. It remains free and open to the public at Telfair Square, in the Historic District of Savannah, Ga.
This author’s appearance has been graciously sponsored by:
- Mr. and Mrs. Michael and Suzanne Ainslie
Podcasts
This author has taken part in the 2011 festival’s pre-event podcasts with CityTrex.