Queer Armenian Reading Featured Writers

We are proud to to feature the following writers for our Queer Armenian Literature: A Reading event on June 5 at 1pm EST.

Hover over each photo to read their bios.

Lillian Avedian

Lillian Avedian (she/her) is an Armenian American journalist and poet from Los Angeles, California. Journey to Tatev, published with Girls on Key Press, is her first poetry collection. She serves as a staff writer for the Armenian Weekly. Her writing also appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hetq and the Daily Californian. She is currently pursuing master’s degrees in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies at New York University.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, researcher, and artist born in Yerevan and based in Glendale, CA. She will join Occidental as a Visiting Mellon Professor in the Practice this fall. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training: Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.

Naka

Naka is a poet, a feminist, an activist, a sister, a daughter, a friend, an immigrant, a lesbian, a teacher, a coffee cup reader, a queer.

Armen Davoudian

Armen Davoudian is the author of Swan Song, which won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in California, where he is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Nyri A. Bakkalian

Dr. Nyri A. Bakkalian is a novelist, recovering academic, raconteur, and Your Favorite Historydyke. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Grey Dawn: A Tale of Abolition and Union (Balance of Seven Press) and hosts the podcast Friday Night History. Follow her on Twitter, Patreon, Twitch, Itch.io, and Gumroad at riversidewings.

Hrayr Khanjian

Hrayr Khanjian publishes his poetry on Instagram. His poem Venus was recently published on Hye-Phen Magazine. հրայր hrayr is a մտհայիչ western-armenian’ist տարօրինակված queer faggot empath երջանիկ hairy kinkster wiz ծաղկասէր flower ftografer from occupied Yelamu Ohlone Terrority (San Francisco) he/him.

Audrey Kouyoumdjian

Audrey Kouyoumdjian spent 22 years while secretly going from Straight to Gay demonstrating her passion for positivity. As an author, physiotherapist, physiotherapy lecturer and business entrepreneur, Audrey enhances the lives of her family, friends, patients, colleagues and all the people around her who wish to find and embrace joy and health.

Christopher Atamian

Christopher Atamian is a translator and writer. He produced the play Trouble in Paradise, which won an OBIE award. His poetry collection A Poet in Washington Heights was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in the Huffington Post and the New York Times. He has translated several books from French and Western Armenian into English, including The Bois de Vincennes.

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz [pronounced: Դիաննա Խաչոյեան–Շանց] is a part-time literary translator, avid postcard writer, and nature enthusiast. She is mid-way through her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches collaborations and contestations of dissident ethnosexual Armenian and Turkish subjects through texts, bodies and landscapes, 20^th century to the present. She joins us from Venice, Italy.