How We Sing | 2025 Young Armenian Poets Awards: In Honor of Tamar Asadourian
Founded and directed by Alan Semerdjian, IALA’s Young Armenian Poets Awards in honor of Tamar Asadourian collaborates, for the fifth year, with h-pem, which, in turn, seeks to provide an authentic audience for the annual awards.
Read on to understand more of YAPA’s 2025 edition through Semerdjian’s lens.
I want to start with an image. A video of quarantined Italians on their balconies separated from each other playing music across streets and neighborhoods, countries and oceans. People singing to each other across the world. It’s March of 2020 and the onset of the pandemic. There is much uncertainty and trepidation in these early days of the virus. But there is singing as well. There is always singing.
This year’s prompt for the Young Armenian Poets Awards in Honor of Tamar Asadourian asked entrants to consider German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s words regarding what our response to tragedy and crisis and grief might be. He asks, in his poem “Motto,” if “In dark times / Will there also be singing?” to which he responds “Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.” There is, initially—for many, I imagine—a certain sense of despair that falls like a curtain quite immediately when hearing these words, which seem to have made their way into more and more public conversations lately. Who reading this has not felt the light of the world dim in recent times, and, for too many, virtually (and heartbreakingly) extinguish? But there is also that word, singing, that seems to offer resistance and tension. It refuses to give up and feels this innate impulse to identify, through imagination and resolve, that which ails us and, indeed, that which is part of this complicated human condition, no matter how painful the rendering. It’s the voices from both nearby and far away that offer us inspiration. Things can/must get better.
Once again, the Young Armenian Poets Awards drew submissions from all over the world. The three winners selected for their unique vision and extraordinary attention to craft and innovation offer us compelling artifacts of beauty in response to our call for work. Their songs are meditations on darkness, psychological examinations of familial histories wrought with unreconciled trauma. These are heavy poems but ones with wings nevertheless and taking flight. One young poet charts the emotional journey inside a painting while another finds ways to characterize her bloodline. And another finds himself “a stranger in my own story.” This is a formidable chorus.
And once again, it is important to recognize how this project happens and how we get to this place every year. Firstly, it is important to recognize the generous support from the family of Tamar Asadourian, whose poetic and artistic radiance continues to shine down on us and has now become a beacon for so many other young authors. Additionally, without our gracious judges—Gregory Djanikian, Armine Iknadossian, and Raffi Wartanian—whose insightful commentaries you can find below, we would not be able to facilitate this annual search. And there would be no Young Armenian Poets Awards without the hard work and dedication of International Armenian Literary Alliance Executive Director Hovsep Markarian and Founder Olivia Katrandjian. Their unyielding commitment has created incredible opportunities for so many writers across the globe, and their focus on our youngest makers is a testament to their vision and keen foresight. Of course, every writer needs a reader and a space where their work will live, so we’re grateful for the continued partnership over these last five years with Hamazkayin’s cultural arm, H-Pem, for providing the platform for publication since our inception. And finally, I personally want to thank all of you who put the word out every year about our initiative. Every social media post and share among colleagues and friends and family members means something and goes a long way.
When I was the caretaker of the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center many years ago on Long Island (New York), I had the pleasure of spending the day with the great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. I recall that he, unsurprisingly, held poets in the highest regard and called them the “truest journalists” because their reporting was from the head and the heart. The singing from the balconies during the pandemic was this kind of poetic journalism. Brecht knew this, and, as evidenced from the poetry fielded in this year’s contest, so does the next generation of writers. We need more poets to make sense of the madness of our times and transform experience into music and play that music, over and over again, and shout it from screens to the streets and everywhere in between.
Follow the links below to read the winning poems and commentary:
- Emily Chamichyan: “bloodline” (Winner)
- Hrant Shadyan: “Grandma, I’m Here” (Winner)
- Sarine Shahinian: “Tourniquet” (Winner)
The young poets will read their work at our fifth annual Emerging Writers Showcase, which will take place virtually on October 26, 2025 (Details TBA).
Alan Semerdjian is a writer, musician, and educator. His works include In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009), The Serpent and The Crane (a collaboration of poetry and music with Aram Bajakian), and several collections of critically-acclaimed albums covering a wide range of genres from singer-songwriter to free jazz and alternative rock. He has taught English and Creative Writing in public education for 25 years and is currently the poet laureate of New York’s Nassau County.
Who was Tamar Asadourian?
Born in 1980, Asadourian was an accomplished pianist, author and artist. At 16, she performed at Carnegie Hall, and was acclaimed as “an absorbing artist of uncommon sensitivity and intelligence.” While studying at the Manhattan School of Music, Asadourian was forced to give up the piano due to illness. She suffered from severe depression, and dedicated herself to writing, drawing and the arts. After her untimely death in 2020, a collection of her poetry, prose and artwork was published in a volume entitled I remember you my future… (Naregatsi Art Institute, Yerevan, Armenia, 2022). Read more of Asadourian’s writing here, and read Lilit Keheyan’s reflections on her work here.