Meet IALA’s 2023 Creative Writing Grant Recipient

We would like to thank everyone for submitting to IALA’s 2023 Creative Writing Grant. This was our second year offering such a grant, and we were grateful for the submissions we received during this particularly difficult time. We’re fortunate to have read from so many incredible works.

This year’s grant was for a collection of poetry. We are very pleased to announce that, from the submissions received, the judges have awarded the grant to Alexa Luborsky for her work-in-progress, Deportation Route.

Alexa Luborsky is a writer of Western Armenian and Eastern European Jewish descent. She is an MFA candidate in poetry, an H. Kruger Kaprielian Scholar, and a Rachel Winer Manin Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Hayden’s Ferry Review,Indiana Review, LIT Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, the Offing, Pleiades, The Journal, and West Branch, among others. She is the interviews editor for Poetry Northwest and reads for Meridian. Born in Toronto and raised in Rhode Island, she currently resides in Charlottesville, VA where she is working on her first collection of poetry about genocidal aftermaths and diaspora. You can find out more at alexaluborsky.com. 

We thank everyone for their submission, and our judges Gregory Djanikian and Raffi Wartanian for their invaluable time. We will announce the 2024 grants early next year!

The International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Creative Writing Grant awards $2,500 annually to one Armenian writer whose work-in-progress shows exceptional literary and creative ability. In 2023, the grant was awarded for a collection of poetry, and in the coming years, to works of creative nonfiction and fiction, as well as other mixed genre forms. Learn more about the grant, and meet our 2023 Israelyan English Translation Grant recipients here.