Introducing the Mentors of IALA’s 2026 Mentorship Program
This year, 14 published authors are serving as mentors in IALA’s sixth annual Mentorship Program, which will run until August 31, 2026. Learn more about the incredible authors donating their time to guide our mentees!
Liana Aghajanian is a journalist, editor, and storyteller whose work explores culture, identity, and underreported human experiences. Born in Iran and raised in Los Angeles, she later moved to Detroit after winning a home through the Write A House program for writers and artists. Her work is deeply shaped by migration, place, and community. Her reporting has taken her from religious conversion communities in Berlin to maternal health stories in Mongolia and the only U.S. lab dedicated to investigating crimes against animals in Oregon. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Bon Appétit. Through her long-running project “Dining in Diaspora,” she has spent years documenting how immigrant communities shape American culture and everyday life. She is currently developing a narrative cookbook exploring Armenian diaspora cooking, history, and identity through recipes and reported essays.
Tatevik Ayvazyan is a London-based writer and producer with Rebel Republic Films and the former director of the Armenian Institute. She is the producer of the award-winning poetry film, Taniel, and is currently adapting Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl. She’s a board member of the International Armenian Literary Alliance, focusing on translation projects, and of Azad Archives.
Nyri A. Bakkalian, Ph.D., is a historian of Japan and an author of transgender cyberpunk that has been categorized as “Armenian Diasporan futurism.” She is the first out Armenian-American lesbian novelist. Her novels include Grey Dawn: A Tale of Abolition and Union (2020) and Confluence: A Person-Shaped Story (2022). Her byline has appeared at Unseen Japan, Metropolis Japan, Gutsy Broads, Nursing Clio, and Fountain Magazine. She hosts the podcast Friday Night History. A third-culture kid by international upbringing, she now reluctantly calls Pittsburgh home.
Tamar Marie Boyadjian, Ph.D., is a professor, author, Western Armenian poet, editor, translator, and medievalist. She is the first U.S. born author to publish a book of poetry in Western Armenian: ինչ որ է ան է (Yerevan: Andares, 2015). She is also the first writer of Western Armenian to produce a fantasy series in the language (Arpi Publishing, 2024). She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. She has also served as the main editor of two out of three extant volumes of contemporary Armenian literature in translation into English: makukachu (Ingnakir, 2017) and unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest [Absinthe: World Literature in Translation] (University of Michigan Press, 2017). She was the recipient of the Sona Aroyan Book Prize for her monograph, The City Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2018). Her forthcoming book is titled Կաթիլ մը կին՝ անանուն, անքերթուած a drop of woman: unnamed, unwritten. She currently teaches Western Armenian courses at Stanford University.
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. Arminé is on the Advisory Board of the International Armenian Literary Alliance and is also one of the Tlaquilx poets for Project 1521.
Lola Koundakjian is a writer, editor, and translator who honed her skills at the Ararat Literary Quarterly. She runs the Dead Armenian Poet’s Society and the online Armenian Poetry Project. Her book, The Moon in the Cusp of my Hand, won the Minas and Kohar Tololyan Prize in Contemporary Literature.
Shahé Mankerian is principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School in Pasadena and Director of Mentorship at the International Armenian Literary Alliance. A former co-director of the Los Angeles Writing Project, he is the author of History of Forgetfulness (2021), a semifinalist for the Khayrallah Prize and finalist for several national poetry awards. He is also the Altadena Poet Laureate for 2026-2028.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of eight books, including a trilogy of novels about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. She was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2022. She is Director and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Aline Ohanesian’s debut novel, Orhan’s Inheritance, was published by Algonquin Books in 2015. The book was a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize, the PEN Bellwether Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize. Ohanesian, who is currently working on her second novel, lives and writes in Orange County, California, with her husband and two sons.
Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize and will be released in September. Her work has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize and The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Her poems have won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize, The Writing Salon’s Jane Underwood Poetry Prize, and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2016 and 2025, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she has received funding from the Money for Women / Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Community of Writers, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Currently, she is a Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center.
Nadine Takvorian is an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books and graphic novels. She is a first-generation Armenian-American with family roots in Istanbul, Turkey. She has illustrated numerous books in the children’s educational market for such companies as Scholastic, Heinemann, National Geographic Learning, IDEO, Capstone Press, the Boomer Esiason Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Nadine is a recipient of the Society of Illustrators West, Silver Award in the Children’s Market category. She has also exhibited her work at the Society of Illustrators’ “The Original Art” Exhibition in New York in 2002. Her animated short film, Elegy, has screened at several film festivals, including Slamdance, and won the Special Jury Award for Animation at the SXSW Film Festival in 2004. Her debut YA graphic novel, Armaveni, has received 4 starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, Foreword, and Booklist, and is a Junior Library Guild Gold Star Selection.
Taline Voskeritchian was born in Jerusalem, educated in Lebanon, Jordan, and the United States. Her prose and co-translations have appeared in The Nation, Agni Review, Book Forum, Words Without Borders, Journal of Palestine Studies, Solstice Review, The Common, Los Angeles Review of Books, International Poetry Review, New Verse Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Wasafiri (UK), Alik (Iran), Ahegan (Lebanon), Warwick Review (UK), among other venues. She is co-producer of Vahe Oshagan: Between Acts, a documentary on the modernist Armenian poet Vahé Oshagan, to which she also contributed as poetry translator. She has taught at Boston University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the American University of Armenia. She has conducted translation workshops at Palestinian universities.
Taleen Voskuni is a USA Today Bestselling author who grew up in the Bay Area Armenian diaspora. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in English and currently lives in San Francisco, working in tech. Other than a newfound obsession with writing rom-coms, she spends her free time cultivating her kids, her garden, and her dark chocolate addiction. Her first novel, Sorry, Bro, received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and was favorably reviewed in The New York Times. Sorry, Bro is also the winner of the 2023 Golden Poppy award for best romance. She is also the author of Lavash at First Sight and her most recent bestselling novel, Our Ex’s Wedding.