Sarkisian Workshop Series: Can Storytelling Save Us?
IALA and Mizna present the Sarkisian Workshop Series 2026: Can Storytelling Save Us?
Funded by the Sarkisian Foundation for the Arts and Engineering, the series offers six writing workshops that include literary analysis and generative writing exercises. Designed to bring together writers from diverse backgrounds, these workshops will encourage writers to engage with the pressing issues of our time.
Ticket Price: $20 – General Admission; $16 – IALA Members. Purchase your tickets here.
Poems that Ingest the Difficult World with Peter Balakian
How can poems take on the difficult world—mass violence, social upheaval, the ordinary daily flow of dysfunction and cruelty—and still maintain the necessary depth and complexity the poem demands as a work of literary imagination? Our seminar will explore poets who have made powerful and aesthetically rich work as they have navigated the difficult world. We will discuss how these poems speak to us across time and place and make demands on our own poems.
- Date: September 20, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time
- Facilitator website
- Workshop details
Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza
In what ways are our writing practices captive to disciplines of legitimacy and legibility? How do our craft choices reflect internalized hierarchies of acceptable experiences, languages, and points of view? Are established practices of “good writing” and “credibility” actually forms of silencing? What would we excavate, what would we liberate, if we rebelled against the tyrannies of “correctness” “civility” and “fact”? In this workshop, we will consider cultural conventions around “authority” in authorship, and consider how we might subvert these to create new, insurgent forms. We will ponder the ways erasure may be enacted not only in silence, but in language—and dare to consider what we have left unsaid. We will return to the body, the intuitive, and the non-verbal as frontiers where we might discover our writing again, anew.
- Date: October 18, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time
- Facilitator website
The World in Small Things: Writing the Ordinary in Extraordinary Times with Nur Turkmani
How do we write the everyday during turbulent times? What can a group chat, a grocery receipt, the way we drink our coffee, the sounds from a balcony, or the carvings on a tree outside our window reveal about the worlds we inhabit? The smallest details of our lives often carry histories far larger than themselves. They tell us how we love, remember, flee, endure, belong. They also reveal what we ignore or grow numb to, the ways we learn to look away.
This workshop explores how fiction and poetry transform the ordinary into something revelatory. We’ll read fiction and poetry by writers including Claire Keegan, Carolyn Forché, Toni Morrison, and Yasmin Zaher, asking how attention to objects, routines, gestures, landscapes, and sensory detail can deepen character, sharpen narrative, and open onto larger emotional, social, and historical realities without reducing them to explanation or argument.
- Date: TBA
- Facilitator website
Imagining Alternative Futures with Olivia Katrandjian
As rising temperatures fuel environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption and conflict, it has been argued that all fiction is now climate fiction, because the climate crisis affects every facet of our lives. Moving beyond typical dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, how can fiction help us envision a better reality?
In this two-hour virtual workshop, writers of all genres will be invited to imagine different ways of living and interacting with each other and the earth. We will explore how storytelling allows us to seek justice, and dream up creative approaches to combat the climate crisis. Participants will be encouraged to center often neglected perspectives, and consider how decolonial, feminist and environmental struggles are intertwined. We’ll imagine a world we want to live in, and write a more hopeful future, together.
- Date: March 29, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time
- Facilitator website
- Workshop details
Centering Indigenous Experiences in Climate Narratives with Diane Wilson
Foundational to Indigenous culture is a worldview that is relational to all other beings, a perspective that also shapes our storytelling. Climate narratives from that viewpoint are stories that emphasize this relationality, that accept the responsibility that is intrinsic to being a good relative, and has social justice embedded in its foundation. This workshop will provide context about Dakota people, and key teachings related to this world view, in particular, the concept of Mitakuye Owasin (We Are All Related), food sovereignty, and cultural recovery. Students will explore literature that embodies these teachings, as well as generative writing prompts.
- Date: April 19, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time
- Facilitator website
- Workshop details
Nature, Poetry, and Environmental Collapse with Moheb Soliman
Poetry has a singular capacity to capture our obscure relationship with the non-human living world. But how can this adapt to a world fraught with threats of environmental collapse? Through ecopoetic texts and writers as well as Moheb’s own work about the Great Lakes region, this workshop will explore how contemporary nature writers can navigate between romanticizing the natural sphere, eulogizing its death, and poeticizing environmentalism. Together we will discuss and write about our experiences embodying and rendering natural-cultural spaces and reckon with human desire, humility, alienation, and ambivalence in this era where nature poetry and climate change must co-exist.
- Date: May 31, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time
- Facilitator website
- Workshop details
COP17, the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, will be held in Yerevan, Armenia in October 2026, and through the workshops above, we hope to inspire writers around the world to engage with and produce environmental literature.
This workshop series is produced by the International Armenian Literary Alliance, a global literary platform that supports and celebrates writers and translators by fostering the development and distribution of Armenian literature in the English language, and in translation. Through mentorship, grants, readings, discussions and more, IALA unites and uplifts Armenian writers and fosters intercultural exchange.
Partnering organizations
Mizna: Since 1999, Mizna has promoted experimental approaches to art, literature, and film; work that questions and expands the forms and conceptual frameworks of Arab and SWANA culture.
The Sarkisian Foundation for the Arts and Engineering supports students and institutions that seek to advance ideas which elevate innovative critical thinking, design, and realization of the work. The foundation provides scholarships and grants in the arts and engineering, specifically visual arts, liberal arts, architecture, and performing arts.
IALA programs are shared spaces for creative work, dialogue, and learning. We invite all participants to contribute to an environment of respect, care, and thoughtful engagement. IALA reflects the multiplicity of identities in the Armenian community and beyond, and we do not tolerate any offensive behavior regarding gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, national origin, socio-economic class, educational background, personal style/appearance, citizenship and immigration status, or political affiliation. Participants whose behavior disrupts programs or harms the community may be asked to leave the space or restricted from future participation.