Karén Karslyan (b. 1979) is a poet, visual artist, and translator. Born and raised in Armenia, he moved to the United States in 2005. His first name, Karén, is a male Armenian name pronounced approximately Ka-RAN.

He is the author of six Armenian-language books: No Other Word («Ոչ մի ուրիշ բառ», a collection of haiku (Granish, 2024); On the Tip of the Tongue («Լեզվի ծայրին»), a poetry collection (Granish, 2022); The Regime Is In Panic («Ռեժիմը խուճապի մեջ է»), a play (Actual Art, 2019, staged by Tech Degh); Aterazma («Ատերազմա»), a typographic film-novel, the first book of conceptual/concrete writing in Eastern Armenian (Inknagir, 2016); Doomed to Spell («Գրողի ծոցը»), a poetry collection (Inknagir, 2010); X Frames/Sec («X կադր/վայրկյան»), collected works (Bnagir, 2003). His poems have been translated into French, English, German, Spanish, Serbian, Georgian, and Greek, and have appeared in journals and anthologies.

Karslyan’s Armenian translation of Kathy Acker’s Lust was published in 2015 (Inknagir). He has translated poems by Charles Bernstein and Arthur Sze. His Armenian translation of Peter Balakian’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ozone Journal is forthcoming from ARI Literature Foundation (ARI Press) in 2026.

Karslyan also works across visual poetry, video art, conceptual writing, and flipbook animation. His typographic film-novel Aterazma has also had a life beyond the page through performative presentations at the University of Coimbra in 2018; Zangak Bookstore in Yerevan, in 2019; the University of Michigan in 2022; and the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in 2025. His flipbooks include: Oh, the Water of My Homeland! (2019); Levon, Go Away! (2019); Kocharyan, Go Away! (2020); Pride (2020), Artsakh (2023). Artsakh was featured at Artsakh Uprooted: Aftermaths of Displacement, a symposium hosted by the USC Institute of Armenian Studies. Amputating the USSR, a video art piece (2014) was exhibited at the 2014 One Shot International Short Film Festival in Yerevan and, together with Z Dream of Vladimir (2020) at Inversion, ARÉ Performing Arts Festival, in 2022.

Karslyan was recognized as Armenia’s Public TV Scandalous Writer of the Year 2003. In 2004, he received the Young Artists Award for the manuscript of his novel Password. A group of poems from On the Tip of the Tongue won the Granish-2021 Award for Best Poetry. His short story The Anatomy of Absence (Formerly: “To Say Nothing of the Elephant”) won the Granish 2023 Award for Best Short Story and received second place in the 2024 Tonapet Short Story Contest. . His short story, Anatomy of Absence, won Granish-2023 Award for Best Short Story and received second place in the 2024 Tonapet Short Story Contest.

He earned his PhD in English (Comparative poetics of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne: Intertextuality), in 2004. He is the chairman of the Peace Committee of PEN Armenia. He currently lives in Wisconsin.