Introducing the Mentors of the 2022 IALA Mentorship Program
This year, four published authors are serving as mentors in our second mentorship program, which runs from July 5th through August 30th, 2022. Learn more about the inimitable Armenian authors donating their time to guide our mentees.
The application period for our 2022 mentorship program is now closed. Please subscribe to our newsletter for future updates.
Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian educator, writer and storyteller from Queens, NY. Her fiction explores the depths of love and family relationships, culture and the connections between characters that transcend time and circumstance. Her first novel (unpublished) The Hollowing Moon, was one of the top three finalists of the Anderbo Novel Contest. The sequel The Legacy of Lost Things was published in 2015 (Bleeding Heart Publications) and was the recipient of the 2014 Tololyan Literary Award. Aida has been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Poets & Writers and various reading series throughout Queens and Manhattan. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Award. Her work has most recently appeared in Ekphrasis Review and Lighthouse Weekly, where her story “The Piano” was featured and awarded first place. Her novel All the Ways We Lied is slated for release in January 2024 (Keylight Books/Turner Bookstore.) Read more about her here.
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.
Kayzakian 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. He is also a board member and poetry director of the International Armenian Literary Alliance. Read more about him here.
Carolyne Topdjian is the author of The Hitman’s Daughter (Agora/Polis Books), a gothic mystery which Library Journaldescribes as a “fast-paced, haunting novel of survival” (starred review). In addition to writing suspense novels, Topdjian has published short fiction in PRISM International, Dreamers Magazine, and Firewords Quarterly. She is a professor in the Faculty of Media and Creative Arts at Humber College. Currently, she lives in a 114-year-old haunted house. You can connect with her on Twitter, @TopdjianC, or through her website.
Tamar M. Boyadjian (she/her) is a California-born, Western Armenian poet, translator and Associate Professor of Medieval Mediterranean literature, poetry, and translation.Her work is experimental, visual, intertextual, intercultural, queer; and explores themes around movement, subjectivity, symbols and transmission—drawing from the threats imposed on endangered languages such as her native tongue Western Armenian.
Boyadjian is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. Her writing credits include, ինչ որ է ան է it is what it is (Andares, 2015), the vineyard of mirrors on Armenian and Afrofuturism (forthcoming, 2022), մայրա-հայութիւն armenian matriarchy (forthcoming, 2023). She has also edited two volumes of translation of contemporary Armenian literature into English: makukachu (Inknagir, 2017), and Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest [Absinthe: World Literature in Translation] (University of Michigan Press, 2017). She is currently working on a novel in Western Armenian, entitled Մ_1930 Տիթրոյթ, and a dual language edited series on contemporary women poets in the world composing in Western Armenian today with Dr. Maral Aktokmakyan and Dr. Rachel Goshgarian.