Sarkisian Workshop Series: Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza
Join us for the fifth installment of the Sarkisian Workshop Series: Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza. The virtual workshop will take place on October 18, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time.
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.
Sarah Aziza (she/هي) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, published in April 2025. Winner of the Palestine Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Arab American Book Award Honorable Mention, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, The Hollow Half is a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.
Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications as well as numerous translations. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, United States Artists, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa. She currently lives on unceded Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land where she makes, learns and works towards liberation for Palestine and beyond.
Recommended Reads
- “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”, by Fargo Tbakhi
- Perfect Victims, by Mohammed el-Kurd
- “Two Poems from Nima Hasan”, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
- “Prologue for Now – Gaza”, by Dionne Brand
- The Hollow Half, by Sarah Aziza
- As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, by Leanne Betasomake Simpson
- “I Am Not Your Translator”, by Fady Joudah
- “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, by Audre Lorde
- Interview with Dionne Brand (Between the Covers Podcast)
- “Can You”, by Jorie Graham, featured in To 2040
- Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Ticket Price: $20 – General Admission; $16 – IALA Members
Please reach out to info@armenianliterary.org to benefit from a member discount, or if you are interested in joining but the registration price is prohibitive.
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.
The Sarkisian Workshop Series 2026: Can Storytelling Save Us? is brought to you by IALA and Mizna. 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.
Explore the full series and read along with it by purchasing titles at our Bookshop.org storefront.