Leon Srabian Herald (1896-1976) was an Armenian-American poet who wrote the first English-language text by an Armenian author on the subject of the Armenian Genocide. In 1925, the same year he was in residence, Herald published a first book of poems, This Waking Hour. The Dial serialized his memoirs monthly from December 1926 to June 1927, which describe his home village, education in Cairo, and travel to the U.S. Later that year he moved to New York, where he lived almost all his life. He worked in the New York Public Library with Whittaker Chambers. In 1928, he attended Yaddo. During the 1920s and 1930s, he published in The Nation, The New Republic, Commonweal, Poetry, and Ararat (Armenian quarterly). His story "Power of Horizon" appeared in Edward J. O'Brien's collections of Best Short Stories of 1929. Work also appeared in Armenian-American Poets: A Bilingual Anthology and in William S. Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse. In 1935, he helped form the Federal Writers' Project. He also served as editor of two Armenian-American publications.
(photo courtesy Leigh McKinnon / Flickr: ljmck)
