Aram Saroyan

Aram Saroyan is a poet, artist, novelist and playwright who lives and works in Newport Beach, California. He studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University, and became celebrated for his Minimalist poetry of the 1960s, including his one word poem lighght which, among other qualities, were praised for their visual impact. Alongside his writing, Saroyan has practiced art since he was a teenager, when he made his first explorative drawings and watercolors. Today, his practice investigates abstract color fields and engraving poetry into different materials such as sandstone. “I begin with an impulse to work with a particular color, to make a mark with it and see where it leads,” he says. “The color dictates the process and I try to follow it out as far as it will go onto the canvas.”

Saroyan’s work has been featured in museums and galleries in the US, Europe, India and the Middle East. In Los Angeles, his work has been featured in shows at LACMA, Commonwealth and Council, the As-Is Gallery, and the Hammer’s Biennial Made in LA: a, the, though, only, for which he wrote the subtitle. Saroyan was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has previously taught on faculty in the Masters of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He has published multiple novels, essays, biographies and poetry collections, and his Complete Minimal Poems (2007) won the William Carlos Williams Award.