Literary Lights 2025: Featuring Nancy Kricorian
Our next Literary Lights 2025 reading series event features Nancy Kricorian, award-winning author of The Burning Heart of the World, in conversation with fellow writer, Nanore Barsoumian. The hybrid event will take place on April 15, 2025, at 7:30 PM Eastern Time at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building – 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, Massachusetts, 02478. Watch the recording.
In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War.
Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.
A reception and book signing will follow the event. The Burning Heart of the World is set to release on April 1st, 2025 by Red Hen Press. Support our programming by pre-ordering it here. The novel will also be available for purchase from the NAASR Bookstore on the day of the event.
Praise for the Book
“Like colorful miniatures—from a childhood of elders haunted by the Armenian genocide, to girlhood and adolescence amidst war in Beirut, to marriage and children in New York at the time of 9/11—Nancy Kricorian finds just the right scale to bring her heroine’s passage to vivid, reverberating life.” — Aram Saroyan
“An arrestingly beautiful novel of how families draw us together, but also push us apart. Set amidst the backdrop of displacement and war, The Burning Heart of the World illuminates how we carry history deep into even the most forgotten corners of ourselves. Once you start reading about Vera and her family you won’t be able to put this book down.” — Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of The Evening Hero
Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play and had been continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Ward. She lives in New York City. Sign up for the author’s newsletter here.
Nanore Barsoumian is a Boston-based writer and researcher. She served as editor of The Armenian Weekly (2014-2016) and assistant editor (2010-2014), reporting from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Javakhk, and Turkey. Her articles focus on books, politics and human rights, while her scholarly research explores genocide memorialization and denial. She is currently working on her debut novel, which explores themes of belonging and self-invention. You can read her review of The Burning Heart of the World, published in The Armenian Weekly, here.
Literary Lights 2025 is a monthly reading series organized by IALA, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event—held online or in-person—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.