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 (winner of the 2021 Minas and Kohar Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature), 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.
Lola was a member of the Editorial Board of Ararat, a literary quarterly, from 1995 to 2007; she has read her work at international poetry festivals: Medellín, Colombia (twice); Trois-Rivières, Quebec; Ramallah, Palestine; Lima, Peru; Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has appeared in venues throughout New York’s tri-state area and has co-curated Zohrab Information Center’s poetry readings. 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.