IALA’s launch party March 21, 2021

IALA will host our inaugural launch on March 21, 2021 at 10 am Pacific/ 1 pm Eastern / 5 pm London / 9 pm Yerevan time (Please note that the US has gone through daylight saving time, but Europe has not).

Click here to register for the event.

We will announce our new mentorship program, unveil our 2021 Young Poets Awards, reveal our 2021 calendar of events, and introduce our membership program. We will also host a reading of the following authors:

• Armen of Armenia
• Aram Mrjoian
• Marine Petrossian
• Alan Semerdjian
• Gregory Djanikian
• Arlene Avakian
• Raffi Joe Wartanian
• Nancy Agabian
• Nancy Kricorian
• Lory Bedikian
• J.P. Der Boghossian
• Olivia Katrandjian
• Lola Koundakjian
• Shahé Mankerian
• Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
• Arminé Iknadossian
• Arthur Kayzakian

Established and aspiring writers will also be able to join the International Armenian Literary Alliance through our membership program. Membership will offer writers a variety of opportunities, including access to workshops, craft talks, reading groups, and networking. There will be a tiered and modest membership fee. More details will be forthcoming.

Armen of Armenia 

Armen of Armenia (Armen Ohanyan) is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the President of PEN Armenia Center since 2017. He is known for his short story collection The Return of Kikos, published in 2013. His short story Who Wants to Be a Millionaire appears in the 2015 edition of Best European Fiction collection by Dalkey Archive Press. His writing is significantly influenced by his political activism. In 2015, he participated at City of Asylum Writer Residency program in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, as well as the Fall Residency at the widely acclaimed International Writers’ Project at the University of Iowa. Click here for links to his work.

Aram Mrjoian

Aram Mrjoian is a writer, editor, and instructor at Florida State University. He is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books and the Southeast Review, as well as the managing editor at TriQuarterly. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Cream City Review, Boulevard, Gulf Coast online, The Rumpus, The Millions, Longreads, and many other publications. He is currently at work editing an anthology of diasporan Armenian voices to be published by University of Texas Press in spring 2022. Find his work at arammrjoian.com.

Marine Petrossian

Marine Petrossian is an Armenian writer, famous in her country both as a poet and as an essayist writing on public issues. She has six books of poetry published in Armenia, two books published in France, and one in Argentina. English translations of her poems appeared in Chicago Review, Poetry International and Transcript, Europe’s online review of international writing, among others. In 2007-2009, Petrossian led a weekly column in Haykakan zhamanak, a prominent opposition newspaper. It had an unprecedentedly large readership and made her a public figure in Armenia. And here is her website: marinepetrossian.com

Alan Semerdjian

Alan Semerdjian is a writer, musician, and educator. His works include In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009), The Serpent and The Crane (a collaboration of poetry and music with Aram Bajakian), and several collections of critically-acclaimed albums covering a wide range of genres from singer-songwriter to free jazz and alternative rock. He has taught English and Creative Writing in public education for 25 years. Find his work at: alansemerdjian.com

Gregory Djanikian 

Gregory Djanikian’s latest collection of poetry is Sojourners of the In-Between (Carnegie Mellon University Press). His poems have appeared in such places as The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others. Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, he retired in 2015.

You can purchase Sojourners of the In-Between through Indiebound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. His website is gregorydjanikian.com

Arlene Avakian 

Professor Emeritus Arlene Avakian is a founder and former Chair of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her areas of interest include: social constructions of identities through an intersectional lens which she has explored through autobiography and memory studies as well as whiteness, and food studies.

Recent publications include: “Interrogating Memory and Evidence: An Intersectional Feminist Perspective”, in Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories, Ayse Gul Altinay and Andrea Peto, eds., (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015); “Open Forum Section — with Hourig Attarian, “Imagining our Foremothers: Memory and Evidence of Women Victims and Survivors of the Armenian Genocide”, European Journal of Women’s Studies Special Issue on Gendering Genocide, (Volume 22, Issue 2). “Cooking up Lives: Feminist Food Memoirs,” Feminist Studies (Volume 10, N. 2); “A Different Future?: Armenian Identity Through the Prism of Trauma, Nationalism, and Gender,” New Perspectives on Turkey, ( N. 42/Spring 2010); Her books include: Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian American Memoir (1992), Turkish translation (2019); editor Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meaning of Food and Cooking (1997); co-editor From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (2005) and co-editor of African American Women and the Vote 1837-1965 (1997). She has been involved in social justice activism for many years around the issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

Click here to buy Lion Woman’s Legacy and Through the Kitchen Window through Indiebound.

Raffi Joe Wartanian

Raffi Joe Wartanian is the son of Armenian immigrants from Beirut, and the grandson and great-grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors from Hajin, Adana, Zara, and Kharpert. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, and Humanity in Action, Raffi has taught writing at Columbia University, Rikers Island Jail, the Manhattan VA, and Letters for Peace. As a musician, his albums include Critical Distance (2019) and Pushkin Street (2013).

Nancy Agabian

Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. Her recent novel “The Fear of Large and Small Nations” was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. She is the author of Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books, 2008), a memoir that was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books, 2000), a collection of poetry and performance texts. Her personal essays that explore liminal spaces of identity have been published in The Margins, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Kweli Journal and the Nauset Press anthology, Fierce: Essays by and about Dauntless Women. She teaches creative writing through the lens of social justice at universities and art centers, most recently at NYU and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in SoHo. From 2001—2010, she brought together progressive and traditional sensibilities of the NYC Armenian community through the literary reading series, Gartal.

Click here to buy Me as Her Again on Indiebound.

J.P. Der Boghossian

J.P. is the founder and curator of the Queer Armenian Library and is the President of the Armenian Cultural Organization of Minnesota. He serves as the Equity and Inclusion for Normandale Community College and previously served as the Chief Diversity Officer for Saint Paul College and as the Equity and Inclusion Education Manager for Rainbow Health Initiative. He is the co-founder of IDEAS, LLC whose mission is to advance equity and inclusion through individual coaching, professional development opportunities, as well as policy/program assessments.

Since 2015, J.P. has delivered keynotes and presentations at conferences throughout the Midwest on a variety of topics including: intercultural competency, LGBTQ health equity, racial equity, implicit biases, and culturally responsive organizations. He has published on, and edited publications about, the Minnesota LGBTQ Standards of Inclusion. His essay The Words charts the founding of the Queer Armenian Library and will be published by the University of Texas Press in a forthcoming anthology of Armenian Diasporan writers.

Nancy Kricorian

Nancy Kricorian is a writer and organizer based in New York. She is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and All the Light There Was.

She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Rutgers, Yale and New York University, as well as in the New York City Public Schools with Teachers and Writers Collaborative and in Birzeit for the Palestine Writing Workshop. She is currently at work on a novel about Armenians in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Her website is nancykricorian.net.

Lory Bedikian

Lory Bedikian’s first collection The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her work has been selected several times as a finalist in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund and AFFMA. Poets & Writers chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. Additionally, her poetry was included in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, 2015 and chosen as a finalist in the 2015 AROHO Orlando Competition. Bedikian’s newer work has been published in Miramar, has been featured on the Best American Poetry blog as part of the “Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body” series, is included in the Fall 2018 issue of Tin House and appears in recent issues of The Los Angeles Review and MORIA, as well as on Poets.org. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the recently released anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Knopf, 2020. Also, her poem “On the Way to Oshagan,” will be featured by Pádraig Ó Tuama in a forthcoming Poetry Unbound podcast.

Shahe Mankerian 

Poet Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory A. & M. Hovsepian School in Pasadena, CA. He is the recipient of the Los Angeles Music Center’s BRAVO Award, which recognizes teachers for innovation in arts education. From 2008-2018, he co-directed CSULA’s Los Angeles Writing Project. Recently, he served as the co-editor of Rockvale Review (College Grove, TN). Shahé’s widely published poems are the recipient of numerous literary prizes: Henri Coulette Memorial Award from the Academy of American Poets, Erika Mumford Prize, Daniel Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry Club, Dr. Aram Tolegian award from the Armenian Allied Arts Association, and Editors’ Prize from MARY: A Journal of New Writing. His debut poetry collection, History of Forgetfulness, will be published by Fly on the Wall Press in October of 2021.

Olivia Katrandjian

Olivia Katrandjian is an Armenian-American writer and journalist with a background in reporting and documentary filmmaking. She is the founder and President of IALA. She has worked in Thailand, Armenia, and New York, and her reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, PBS, ABC News and Quartz, among other outlets. In 2016, she moved to Luxembourg to write The Ghost Soldier, a historical novel based on the Ghost Army, an artistic deception unit in the Second World War. The manuscript was awarded second place in the National Literary Prize of Luxembourg in 2019. In 2020, Olivia was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is currently pursuing a masters degree in creative writing at Oxford University, and is a 2021 Creative Armenia-AGBU fellow. Her work is forthcoming in an anthology of Armenian Diasporan writers published by the University of Texas Press. Her website is www.oliviakatrandjian.com.

Lola Koundakjian

Lola Koundakjian writes poetry in Armenian and English. She has four collections: The Accidental Observer; Advice to a Poet (finalist – Orange Book Prize in Armenia); The Moon in the Cusp of my Hand, and, a chapbook of Armenian poems. Her work is in various international anthologies and online magazines. Since her university days, Lola has organized readings for The Dead Armenian Poets Society. She has produced and curated poems and recordings for the online Armenian Poetry Project since 2006.

She was a member of the Editorial Board of Ararat, a literary quarterly, from 1995 to 2007. Lola read her work at international poetry festivals: Medellín, Colombia (twice); Trois-Rivières, Quebec; Ramallah, Palestine; Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile. She has appeared in venues throughout New York’s tri-state area and is co-curator of Zohrab Information Center’s poetry section. In 2019, her poem Այսօր/Today was featured in The Poetry Society in London for their Young Poets Network. Lola has conducted interviews and written articles on science and the arts for various papers in the US.

Her translations of Istanbul’s Armenian poets were selected by Dora Sakayan for her Modern Western Armenian For The English-speaking World, as well as an article about post-Genocide Armenian poets in the online journal Rattapalax.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, researcher, and artist born in Yerevan and based in Glendale, CA. She is a Senior Researcher at the Berggruen Institute, and serves as an Associate Editor for Noema Magazine and a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training: Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.

With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of Research Service, a media collective that pursues performative and practice-based forms of scholarship. Her writing has appeared in Performance Research Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Georgia, Art Papers, and elsewhere.

Armine Iknadossian

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Arminé Iknadossian’s family fled to California when she was four years old to escape the civil war. After graduating from UCLA, Iknadossian earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University. The author of All That Wasted Fruit (Main Street Rag), Iknadossian’s work is included in Whale Road Review, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, KYSO Flash/MacQueen’s Quarterly and The American Journal of Poetry. She has received fellowships from Idyllwild Arts, The Los Angeles Writing Project and Otis College of Art and Design. She lives in Long Beach, California where she offers writing workshops and private manuscript consultations.

Arthur Kayzakian

Arthur Kayzakian is a poet, editor and teacher who lives in California. He was born in Tehran, Iran. His family sought political asylum in London when he was three years old to escape the Iranian Revolution.  He earned his MFA from San Diego State University. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International. His chapbook, My Burning City, was a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize and Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. He is a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship, and his poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from several publications including Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, COUNTERCLOCK, Chicago Review, Locked Horn Press and Prairie Schooner. His website is: artkayzakian.com.