Published in 2017, A Poet in Washington Heights by Christopher Atamian is one of the first [*] poetry collections by a gay Italian-Armenian.
Atamian is a translator, writer, and director. He produced the play Trouble in Paradise, which won an OBIE award. His writing has appeared in the Huffington Post and New York Times.
He has translated several books from French and Western Armenian into English, including The Bois de Vincennes, Krikor Beledian’s Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France, and Marc Nichanian’s Literature and Catastrophe and The Armenian Language throughout History.
The volume won the 2017 Toloyan Prize, the fourth ever award of the Minas and Kohar Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature.
In his poetry he covers a wide-ranging array of themes: his mother, an old boyfriend, Armenian identity, red pubic hair.
Red pubes drive me mad
On tattooed boy
With sinew of curve
and tilt of waistRed Pubes by Christopher Atamian
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ISBN: 978-1976483936. Published by Nauset Press.
