Nona Balakian
Nona Balakian was a literary critic and an editor at the New York Times Sunday Book Review. She served on the Pulitzer Prize committee and was a board member of the Authors Guild and the Pen Club as well as a founder of the National Book Critics Circle, whose Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing is named for her.
She and her sister, Anna Balakian, a literary critic and professor at New York University who died in 1997, were members of a literary circle that also included the playwright William Saroyan and the diarist Anaïs Nin. The Balakian sisters were the grandnieces of the archbishop and Armenian genocide survivor Grigoris Balakian and the aunts of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Balakian.
