Literary Lights: A Reading Series Featuring New Works by Armenian Authors
The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center will host Literary Lights, a monthly reading series in 2023 featuring new works of literature by Armenian authors. Each event—held from February to November in a mixed online and in-person format—will feature a writer, editor or translator reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Audience members are invited to read along with the series.
FEBRUARY: Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni
The reading series will begin with a virtual event on February 7, at 8:00 PM ET on Taleen Voskuni’s Sorry, Bro, a queer romantic comedy in which an Armenian-American woman rediscovers her roots and embraces who she really is. Voskuni, an Armenian-American writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be in discussion with JP Der Boghossian, writer, founder of the Queer Armenian Library, and host of This Queer Book Saved My Life. Click here for more information (and here to watch the recording of the event).
MARCH: A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz
On March 29, at 7:00 PM ET, we’ll host an in-person event at the Zohrab Information Center in New York on A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz. The book is about an imagined encounter between two early twentieth-century feminist writers, Zabel Yesayan and Shushanik Kurghinian, juxtaposed with a conversation between the author and a friend. Avagyan is a translator, author, and the co-founder of the queer-fem Queering Yerevan Collective in Armenia’s capital. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a translator working in the geographies of Armenia, Turkey, and their diasporas, at the intersection of critical, feminist and queer theory, archive and critical race studies. Cachoian-Schanz and Avagyan will engage in conversation with translator, scholar, and teacher of the Armenian language, Lisa Gulesserian (Cover design by Cinzia D’Emidio). Click here for more information.
APRIL: We Are All Armenian edited by Aram Mrjoian
In April, the series will highlight We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora edited by Aram Mrjoian, with both an in-person at Columbia University (April 3, at 7:00 PM ET) hosted by the Columbia University Armenian Center and co-sponsored by the Armenian Society of Columbia University, and a virtual event (April 29, at 1:00 PM ET). We Are All Armenian is a groundbreaking collection of personal essays exploring the multilayered realities of life in the Armenian diaspora. Mrjoian, who will moderate both events, is an author, editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books, and an associate fiction editor at Guernica. Click here for more information.
MAY: American Wildflowers edited by Susan Barba
On May 17, at 7:30 PM ET, NAASR will host Susan Barba, editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide in an in-person event. This anthology is filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike. Barba is the author of the poetry collections Fair Sun (2017) and geode (2020), and an editor at New York Review Books based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barba will discuss the anthology with Jesse Arlen, a writer, researcher and Director of the Zohrab Center. Click here for more information.
JUNE: The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian
On June 17, at 1:00 PM ET, in a virtual event, we present Arthur Kayzakian’s The Book of Redacted Paintings, erasure-ekphrasis poems about a boy in search of his father’s painting, which may or may not exist. The collection won the inaugural 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Kayzakian will also discuss his forthcoming chapbook, My Burning City, which integrates the author’s personal history during the Iranian Revolution, his family’s migration to the United States, and the state of living in America as a displaced, bilingual Iranian-Armenian. Kayzakian is an author, teacher, IALA Poetry Chair and Board Member, and a Contributing Editor at Poetry International.
NOVEMBER: The Fear of Large and Small Nations by Nancy Agabian
The series will resume, on November 5 (rescheduled date), with an event on Nancy Agabian’s The Fear of Large and Small Nations, a contemporary story of an abusive relationship between a queer couple, set between the Armenian homeland and diaspora. The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. An activist, teacher and IALA Board Member, Agabian is the author of Princess Freak (2000), the first collection of poems and performance texts by a bisexual Armenian-American, and Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (2008), finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize. Click here for more information.
DECEMBER: The Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
On December 3, the reading series will conclude with an event on Mashinka Firunts Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences, which chronicles the transcription of a symposium at a fictive institute where machine intelligences convene annually for lectures and training on algorithmic justice. Hakopian is a Yerevan-born, Glendale-based writer, artist, researcher, teacher, IALA Advisory Board Member, and a Contributing Editor for Art Papers and ASAP/J. Click here for more information.