Introducing the 2021 IALA Mentors for the first of its kind mentorship program

IALA matched eleven published authors as mentors for the inaugural session of our mentorship program, which will run from July 5th through August 30th, 2021. Learn more about the inimitable Armenian authors donating their time to guide our mentees. 

The application period for our 2021 mentorship program is closed. Please sign-up for our emails to learn when the 2022 application period will open.

 

 

Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. 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, prose, and performance art texts. Both books deal with the intimacies of Armenian American identity via stories of coming-of-age and intergenerational trauma (resulting from the Armenian genocide of 1915), with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her recent novel, “The Fear of Large and Small Nations”, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. She is currently working on a personal essay collection, In-Between Mouthfuls, that frames liminal spaces of identity within causes for social justice; select essays have appeared in The Margins, The Brooklyn Rail, Kweli Journal, Hyperallergic, and  A longtime community-based writing workshop facilitator, she teaches creative writing at universities, art centers, and online, most recently at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. As a literary organizer, she has coordinated Gartal, an Armenian literary reading series, and Queens Writers Resist with writers Meera Naira and Amy Paul. Nancy is a caregiver to her elderly parents in Massachusetts, where she lives.

 

 

Armen Davoudian is the author of Swan Song, which won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in California, where he is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. He is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program and, for many years, was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania which he attended as an undergraduate. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, Dear Gravity, and, most recently, Sojourners of the In-Between. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two prizes from Poetry magazine (the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and Friends of Literature Prize), the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and multiple residencies at Yaddo.

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others.

 

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA and born in Yerevan, Armenia. She is an Associate Director of Research at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. In Fall 2021, she will be joining the faculty of Occidental College as a Mellon Visiting Professor in the Practice, and will co-curate an exhibition at Oxy Arts entitled “Encoding Futures: The Speculative World-Making of Algorithmic Aesthetics.” Hakopian received a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the Institute, she held a two-year teaching appointment in UCLA’s Department of English. Her book Algorithmic Bias Training: Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books. Her writing and reviews have appeared in Performance Research Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, and Art in America.

 

 

 

 

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 while teaching full time.

The author of All That Wasted Fruit (Main Street Rag), Iknadossian’s poetry is forthcoming in Five South. Her work has been featured in HyeBred, Armenian Poetry Project, Whale Road Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Cultural Weekly, The San Diego Reader, The Nervous Breakdown and The American Journal of Poetry.

Iknadossian has received fellowships from Idyllwild Arts, The Los Angeles Writing Project and Otis College of Art and Design. She is also one of the poets of Project 1521, which brings together artists, writers, and scholars to generate visual and literary works as acts of resistance. Her other passion project is collaborating with the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) where she serves on the advisory board and volunteers her time for their mentorship program. Iknadossian offers writing workshops and manuscript consultations. Discover more at www.surprisetheline.com and www.armineiknadossian.com

 

 

 

Nancy Kricorian is a New York City-based writer and organizer. She is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and most recently All the Light There Was,which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during World War II.

Kricorian’s poetry has been published in PARNASSUS, MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, GRAHAM HOUSE REVIEW, ARARAT, and other journals. Her essays have appeared in MINNESOTA REVIEW, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE, IN THESE TIMES, WOMEN’S STUDIES QUARTERLY, and online at GUERNICA, ALTERNET, MONDOWEISS and other outlets. She has taught at Yale, Columbia and Barnard Colleges, among others.

In May 2010 Kricorian participated in the Palestine Festival of Literature, which toured the Occupied West Bank. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Anahid Literary Award of the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and a Gold Medal of the Writers Union of Armenia, among other honors. Nancy Kricorian was the Fall 2015 Writer-in-Residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, and is a Fellow of the Women Mobilizing Memory Project at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She was a member of the staff of CODEPINK Women for Peace from 2003-2016, and served on the Executive Committee of the Armenia Tree Project from 2001-2016.

 

 

Markar Melkonian has taught philosophy for years at California State University, Northridge. He holds three graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His books include The Philosophy and Common Sense Reader: Writings on Critical Thinking (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), which is the first and only reader on the topic, and the highly praised Richard Rorty’s Politics: Liberalism at the End of the American Century (Humanities Press, 1999). My Brother’s Road about Monte Melkonian was published by I.B. Tauris in 2005 (revised paperback 2008). His research interests include skepticism, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of social sciences, classical Indian philosophy, and the Presocratics. He has written on topics as varied as philosophy of death, the recent history of Lebanon, and the roles of nongovernmental organizations in the nominally independent states of the former Soviet Union. His scholarly articles, on topics ranging from political philosophy to California history, have appeared in many scholarly journals, and his books have been translated into four languages and counting.

 

 

Lola Koundakjian is a New York based poet who writes in Western Armenian and English. Her work has been translated and published worldwide and she was invited to five international poetry festivals since 2010 – Medellín, Colombia (twice); Lima, Peru; Ramallah, West Bank; Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada; and, Santiago, Chile.

Lola has curated readings in New York City, organized salon gatherings for The Dead Armenian Poets Society, and since 2006, promoted Armenian culture with texts, translations and audio for the Armenian Poetry Project. She was on the Editorial Board of Ararat, a literary quarterly, from 1995 to 2007.

A graduate of Hunter College and Columbia University, she has participated in conferences and published articles about Armenian studies, artists and scientists. 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.

Lola is the author of four poetry collections: The Accidental Observer (2011 USA); Advice to a Poet, an Orange Book prize finalist in Armenia (2014 Peru; 2015 USA), The Moon in the Cusp of My Hand (2020) and a chapbook (2020).

 

Aline Ohanesian’s debut Orhan’s Inheritance, published by Algonquin Books in 2015, was a finalist for half a dozen literary prizes, including the Dayton Peace Prize, the PEN Bellweather and the Center for Fiction Prize for debut fiction. She is currently working on her sophomore book, a feminist reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey as told by four marginalized characters. She lives and writes in Southern California.

 

 

 

 

 

Alene Terzian-Zeitounian received an M.A. and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing with an emphasis in poetry. Her first book, Deep as City’s Ache, explores the Lebanese Civil Conflict both environmentally and psychologically. She is currently working on her EdD in leadership and innovation while serving as the English Department Chair and teaching creative writing at College of the Canyons. She is also the faculty advisor of COC’s award-winning literary magazine, cul-de-sac. Her poems have appeared in The Colorado Review, Cordite, Levitate, Media Cake, Rhapsodomancy, Duende, and Rise Up Review to name a few.