Alan Whitehorn is a poet and emeritus professor of political science at the Royal Military College of Canada located in Kingston. He is the grandson of an orphan of the Armenian Genocide. He was born in Portsmouth, United Kingdom in 1946 and immigrated to Canada in 1953. In the mid-1990s, he was the first holder of the JS Woodsworth Chair in Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. As an academic, he writes on the topics of genocide, human rights, the South Caucasus, political parties and elections. As a poet, he explores the issue of genocide and its impact on Armenian identity. His books include: The Armenian Genocide: Resisting the Inertia of Indifference (Blue Heron, Kingston, 2001) (coauthor); Ancestral Voices: Identity, Ethnic Roots and A Genocide Remembered (Hybrid, Winnipeg, 2007); Just Poems: Reflections on the Armenian Genocide (Hybrid, Winnipeg, 2009); Return to Armenia/Veradardz depi Hayastan (Lusakn, Yerevan, 2012); and The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2015) (editor).

Since 2005, Alan Whitehorn has been a frequent lecturer and participant at numerous international conferences and symposia in Armenia, including most recently the 2019 Aurora Forum. He has published poems and articles in a number of Armenian newspapers, both in Yerevan (168.am) and in the Diaspora (Armenian Mirror Spectator, Armenian Weekly, Toronto Hye, Keghart) and elsewhere. As a senior academic and public intellectual, professor Whitehorn has been involved in lectures or discussions with several key Armenian institutions, most notably the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute, the Writers' Union of Armenia, several Armenian universities, the Aurora Forum/Futures projects, along with international South Caucasus conflict resolution workshops. His current book project is an edited collection of poems and essays on Karabakh.