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ARAM SAROYAN was born on September 25, 1943 in New York City. He attended public and private schools on both the East and West coasts and graduated from Trinity School in Manhattan in 1962. After attending the University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia, he started a literary magazine, Lines, in New York in 1964, publishing the work of Charles Olson, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Ted Berrigan, among others.
His one-word poem "lighght" became the subject of ongoing decades-long government and public debate after being chosen for a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award by Robert Duncan in 1968. His poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the other collections of his work are Aram Saroyan and Pages.
Saroyan's 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; Trio: Oona Chaplin / Carol Matthau / Gloria Vanderbilt--Portrait of an Intimate Friendship; The Romantic, a novel that was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Critics' Choice selection; a memoir, Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer, and a true crime book, Rancho Mirage: An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder. His first prose book, The Street, is being made into a movie. Most recently he has written a series of plays.
A past president of PEN Center USA West, Saroyan is a faculty member of the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. The father of three children, he lives in Santa Monica with his wife, the painter Gailyn Saroyan.
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