Prose Balakian's memoir Black Dog of Fate (1997) dealt with an Armenian American boy's coming of age in affluent suburban New Jersey of the 1950s and '60s as he comes to uncover the unspoken trauma of the Armenian genocide his grandparents survived. The book received the PEN/Albrand Award for memoir, was a New York Times Notable Book, and a book of the year for Publishers Weekly. Sybil Steinberg editor at Publishers Weekly on the Charlie Rose Show noted that Balakian's memoir was pushing against the self-obsessed American memoir and creating a new orientation for the genre. Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker called it "a richly imagined memoir, carefully documented, that asks painful questions of us all." The Philadelphia Inquirer called it "a landmark chapter in the literature of witness." Dinitia Smith's feature on Balakian in the New York Times "A Poet Knits Together Memories of Armenian Horrors," credited Black Dog of Fate with opening up a new space in memory culture. His 2004 book The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list. In this narrative history, Balakian brought together two stories: the Ottoman Turkish Empire's eradication of its Armenian Christian minority population of more than two million people during the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and in the genocide of 1915, and a little known history of how Americans became international human rights activists for the Armenians during the period of 1895 to 1925 and launched the first international human rights mission in American history. Theodore Roethke's Far Fields was published in 1988. Balakian's Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture was published in 2015. His collaborative translations from the Armenian include: Bloody News From My Friend by Siamanto (with Nevart Yaghlian); Armenian Golgotha, a memoir, by Grigoris Balakian (with Aris Sevag) (2009); The Ruins of Ani by Krikor Balakian with Aram Arkun. Public Intellectual Work For decades, Balakian has worked to combat the Turkish government's denial and propaganda campaigns which is aimed at suppressing the history of the Armenian Genocide and pressuring the US and other nations not to acknowledge it. Balakian has argued that the Armenian Genocide became the template for other genocides which were carried out in a modern modality and he has also argued that it was an influence on the Nazi genocide of the Jews of