Watch: Literary Lights 2024 Launch: Featuring Aida Zilelian
We launched our second annual monthly reading series, Literary Lights, on January 27, 2024. The virtual event featured Tololyan Literary Prize recipient Aida Zilelian, author of All the Ways We Lied, joined by Nancy Agabian, author of Princess Freak (2000), Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (2008), and the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction finalist, The Fear of Large and Small Nations (2023). Watch the recording on our YouTube channel.
Literary Lights is a monthly reading series organized by IALA, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event—held online—will feature a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Keep an eye on our website and socials for the exact dates of each event. Read along with the series by purchasing titles from the IALA Bookstore powered by Bookshop or the NAASR Bookstore.
Set in Queens, New York, while a father deteriorates from terminal illness, three sisters contend with one another, their self-destructive pasts, and their indomitable mother as they face the loss of the one person holding their unstable family together.
Kohar, the oldest sister, is happily married, yet grapples with fertility issues and, in turn, her own self-worth. Lucine, the middle child, is trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by memories of her estranged father. Azad, the beloved youngest child, is burdened by an inescapable cycle of failed relationships.
By turns heartfelt and heart-wrenching, All the Ways We Lied introduces a cast of tragically flawed but lovable characters on the brink of unraveling. With humor and compassion, this spellbinding tale explores the fraught and contradictory landscape of sisterhood, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common, and are bound by blood and history. Learn more about the novel.
Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer, educator and storyteller from Queens, NY. She is the author of The Legacy of Lost Things, recipient of the Tololyan Literary Award. She has been featured in the Huffington Post, NPR’s Takeaway, Poets & Writers, Kirkus Reviews, among other media and print outlets. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Zilelian was the curator of Boundless Tales, one of the first and longest-running reading series in Queens, NY, which she recently revived. She is on the Board of Directors of Newtown Literary, a Queens-based literary journal that supports emerging writers, and a IALA Advisory Board member. All the Ways We Lied is her second published novel.