Introducing the Mentors of the 2024 IALA Mentorship Program
This year, 13 published authors are serving as mentors in our fourth annual mentorship program, which will run until August 31, 2024. Learn more about the incredible Armenian authors donating their time to guide our mentees!
The application period for our 2024 mentorship program is closed. Please subscribe to our newsletter for future updates.
Tina Demirdjian is a poet and has taught in schools, museums, businesses and libraries for 30 years in Los Angeles. She is also a culture bearer, and as founder of the Armenian Dress & Textile Project.
She is the recipient of grants from the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Durfee Foundation, California Council for the Humanities. She is published in various journals and author of IMPRINT, and a contributor to Birthmark: a Bilingual Anthology of Armenian-American Poetry.
Demirdjian is a Board Member of Brand Associates, and is a co-collaborator of the art history and poetry workshop, ARTful Conversations, at Brand Gallery.
Ariel Djanikian is the author of two novels, The Prospectors (William Morrow, 2023), selected for the Barnes & Noble Book Club, and The Office of Mercy (Viking, 2013). She attended the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA program at the University of Michigan. She is the previous recipient of a Fulbright grant, Meijer Fellowship, Cowden Award, and Hopwood Award, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The Millions, and The Rumpus. Born in Philadelphia, she currently lives near Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Arminé Iknadossian’s family fled to California when she was four years old to escape the civil war. After graduating from UCLA, Iknadossian earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University. The author of All That Wasted Fruit (Main Street Rag Press), Iknadossian’s work is included in XLA Anthology, Ruminate, Five South, Whale Road Review, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quarterly and The American Journal of Poetry. She recently received a Professional Artists Grant from the Arts Council of Long Beach. She has also received fellowships from Idyllwild Arts, The Los Angeles Writing Project and Otis College of Art and Design. Armine is on the Advisory Board of IALA and is also one of the Tlaquilx poets for Project 1521.
Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He serves as the Poetry Chair for IALA. His work has appeared in several publications, including The Adroit Journal, Portland Review, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Witness Magazine.
Dawn Anahid MacKeen is a reporter and author of The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey, which chronicles her grandfather’s survival of genocide. The book was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and received an Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Previously she was a staff writer at Salon, Newsday, and SmartMoney: The Wall Street Journal Magazine. A long-time reporter of health and wellness, she has written for The New York Times, ELLE, Real Simple, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
Jennifer Manoukian is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her doctorate in 2023 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Her research focuses on Ottoman Armenian language practices and ideologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also a translator from Western Armenian and presently at work on an English translation of Yervant Odian’s memoir 12 Years Away from Constantinople, an entertaining account of the writer’s exploits and escapades across Europe and Egypt between 1896 and 1908.
Markar Melkonian is a nonfiction writer and a retired Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University Northridge. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1997. His books include The Philosophy and Common Sense Reader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), which is the first and only reader on the topic, and the well-reviewed book, Richard Rorty’s Politics: Liberalism at the End of the American Century (Humanities Press, 1999). He has written on a variety of topics, including the philosophy of death, philosophy of science, and NGO’s in the former Soviet Union.
Arthur Nersesian is the author of eight novels, including The Fuck-Up (Akashic, 1997 & MTV Books/Simon & Schuster, 1999), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic), Suicide Casanova (Akashic), dogrun (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster), and Unlubricated (HarperCollins). He is also the author of East Village Tetralogy, a collection of four plays. Nersesian was the managing editor of the literary magazine “The Portable Lower East Side” and was an English teacher at Hostos Community College (C.U.N.Y.) in the South Bronx. He was born and raised in New York City, and currently lives there.
Jen Siraganian is a writer, educator, literary organizer, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos. A graduate of Brown University and University of Arkansas, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, awarded a Lucas Arts Fellowship, and profiled in San Francisco Chronicle and The Mercury News. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Mid-American Review, Smartish Pace, and other journals and anthologies. She has served as Managing Director for Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival and taught literature and creative writing in schools and community settings for twenty years.
Gina Srmabekian’s work grapples with transgenerational trauma, memory and identity. She writes toward her own freedom and toward the freedom of all displaced peoples from Artsakh to Palestine and beyond. She writes about grief and in times of grief because it is the most powerful articulation of love. She is the winner of Ninth Letter’s Creative Nonfiction Prize and her work appears in DIAGRAM journal. She is a lecturer at California State University, Northridge and lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Bailey.
Meline Toumani is the author of There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has written for The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation, n+1, Salon, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Travel + Leisure, and many other publications. Toumani currently teaches creative nonfiction writing in the low-residency MFA program at Goucher College. She has also taught writing in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program, helped run a reporting institute at Rostov State University in Russia, and has held staff editorial positions at The New York Times, KQED Public Media, and GreatSchools.
Patricia Sarrafian Ward was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, moving to the United States when she was eighteen. She is the author of The Bullet Collection (Graywolf Press, 2003), Skinner Luce (Talos Press, 2016), The Cherished (HarperCollins, 2023), and Mercy (forthcoming from HarperCollins, 2025). Ward is also a book artist specializing in miniature books and dioramas. She lives with her family in Vermont.
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 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. Aida’s most recent novel, All the Ways We Lied, is forthcoming in January 2024 (Keylight Books). She is currently working on completing her short story collection, Where There Can Be No Breath At All.