Aram Saroyan is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. His poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry are: Aram Saroyan and Pages (both Random House) and Day and Night: Bolinas Poems, published by Black Sparrow Press. His prose books include: Genesis Angels: the Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, Last Rites, a book about the death of his father, the playwright and short story writer William Saroyan, The Romantic, a novel that was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Critics’ Choice selection and many more. His play At The Beach House starring Orson Bean had its world premiere in Los Angeles in 2005.
The recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts poetry awards Saroyan is a past president of PEN USA West and a current faculty member of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC.
During Aram’s interview in Bixby Canyon, he spoke about how the Beat writers influenced him when he was young: “I picked up Howl and read it, and it was like oh, life is big. It’s got all these colors. It’s got pain and pleasure and everything going on in it, and that’s what the Beats did. They sort of put back the colors into the palette, and no one more so than Jack Kerouac.”
