Introducing the Mentors of IALA’s 2025 Mentorship Program
This year, 12 published authors are serving as mentors in IALA’s fifth annual Mentorship Program, which will run until August 31, 2025. Learn more about the incredible Armenian authors donating their time to guide our mentees!
The application period for IALA’s 2025 Mentorship Program is closed. Please subscribe to our newsletter for future updates.
Nancy Agabian is the author of The Fear of Large and Small Nations, a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction and the Foreword Indies Prize in Multicultural Fiction, published by Nauset Press in 2023. Her previous books include Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books), a collection of poetry, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books), a memoir. In 2021 she was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She is currently working on a personal essay collection, “Mouthfuls” which uses lenses of dementia, caregiving, and grief to find hope and perseverance during times of pandemic, war, and genocide.
Sylvia Angelique Alajaji is the author of Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile. She was most recently Professor of Music at Franklin & Marshall College and is currently serving as Associate Director of the CNRS-UChicago International Research Center for Fundamental Discovery at the University of Chicago.
Haig Chahinian is an independent career counselor whose writing has been published in O The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books. His solo show Best. Dad. NEVER. is running at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles this June. Stage and Cinema calls the piece “quietly revolutionary: a man rewriting the script for what fatherhood can look like today.” Keep an eye at BestDadNEVER.com for details and additional dates to come.
Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also Visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the author of the award-winning book, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse University Press, 2023). Along with Tsolin Nalbantian and Sossie Kasbarian, she is the co-editor of The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2023). She co-edits Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and contributes regularly to the literary magazine Pakin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dr. Alene Terzian-Zeitounian is a globally minded leader, poet, and educator with a deep commitment to advocacy and social justice. She currently serves as the Humanities Department Chair and teaches creative writing at College of the Canyons. She is also the faculty advisor of cul-de-sac, the campus’s award-winning literary and arts magazine. She holds an M.A. and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with a concentration in poetry, and a doctorate in Education, specializing in Leadership and Innovation. Her work has been featured in esteemed publications such as the Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Mizna, and Rise Up Review.
Lori Yeghiayan Friedman is a first generation Armenian American from Los Angeles, California who now calls Portland, Oregon home. Her most recent work has appeared in Mizna, Atlas and Alice, Phoebe, Lost Balloon, Pithead Chapel, Memoir Land and the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has earned both Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. She holds an MFA in Theatre from UCSD and is the proud recipient of the 2024 IALA Creative Writing Grant. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky: @loriyeg
Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer, educator and storyteller from Queens, NY. She is the author of the novels All the Ways We Lied and The Legacy of Lost Things, recipient of the Tololyan Literary Award. She has been performing at storytelling events in NYC, Boston, Montreal and Los Angeles. Aida has also been featured in the Huffington Post, NPR’s Takeaway, among other reading series and print outlets. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and her short story “The Piano” won first prize in the Lighthouse Weekly contest. Dissonance is her first poetry chapbook.