My Grandmother (Tatik) by YAPA 2026 Winner Michelle Pinkerton-Babayan
Read Michelle Pinkerton-Babayan’s poem “My Grandmother (Tatik)” – one of the three winners of the 2026 Young Armenian Poets Awards in Honor of Tamar Asadourian.
My Grandmother (Tatik)
At times my grandmothers voice cools my swollen head
Sometimes it sounds of frayed thread
Weathered by centuries of mountain wind
Other times her voice carried a raspy joy
it sounded like clinks of thin coins being counted into her frail palms
It was the sound of someone
once wealthy in people and land
My Tatik loves to talk of her homeland
She tells me of honey thick summers
With purple stained fingers.
and when time clung to the leaves
And July dripped as slow as sap
What she cannot return to, she gives instead
Still, she presses language into my hands
like warm bread
insisting I take more than I think I can carry
And I wonder
What is it like to inherit the unfinished
To be left with the keys to a house left destroyed
To be the one tasked with dreaming the dreams she had to abandon.
If the future of us
is not in what was taken
but in what refuses to leave
So I gather her words
and stitch them into my own voice
Michelle Pinkerton-Babayan is a 14-year-old student at Yerevan’s CIS Armenia International School. She was born and raised by an Armenian mother in a small city called Aktau in Kazakhstan. She decided to submit her work to YAPA because of her deep love for literature and the humanities, and to honor her Armenian heritage which is ever dearer to her.
YAPA Judge Raffi Joe Wartanian on Pinkerton-Babayan’s poem:
In “My Grandmother (Tatik),” the poet explores inheritance not as the passive reception of a past, but as the unfinished work of carrying something forward. The grandmother’s voice—at times “frayed” by centuries of “mountain wind,” at others animated by a “raspy joy”—becomes a vessel for a homeland that can no longer simply be returned to. Through tactile and sensory images of “honey thick summers,” purple-stained fingers, and July dripping “as slow as sap,” the poet renders memory as something living, embodied, and transmissible. Yet what makes the poem especially compelling is its refusal to allow nostalgia to have the final word. “What she cannot return to, she gives instead,” the poet writes, transforming loss into an act of generosity as the grandmother presses language into the speaker’s hands “like warm bread.” From here, inheritance becomes a nourishment of both burden and possibility: “What is it like to inherit the unfinished / To be left with the keys to a house left destroyed?” The poem ultimately answers its own question not by recovering what was lost, but by imagining what might be made from it. In gathering the grandmother’s words and stitching them “into my own voice,” the poet offers a moving vision of Armenianness as something neither frozen in the past nor severed from it, but continually remade through the voices of those who inherit it.
Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer, educator, and musician who teaches undergraduate writing at UCLA and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate in the City of Glendale, California.
He is a 2025-2026 Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets to support poetry programming with communities impacted by the January 2025 Eaton Fire, and an արդ եւս | in view Grantee with the Gulbenkian Foundation to cultivate a Western Armenian poetry community at the intersection of language and folk music.
He holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where he also taught undergraduate writing. During his time in New York, Raffi led writing workshops at Rikers Island Jail, the Manhattan VA, Khrimian Lyceum, and founded Letters for Peace. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from The Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, and Humanity in Action among others, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere; his poetry has been published with Poets.org, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, No Dear Magazine, Altadena Poetry Review, The Poetry Lighthouse, The Los Angeles Press, and beyond.
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and composer, Raffi has performed internationally and released two full-length albums of original music: Pushkin Street and Critical Distance. He is the proud grandson and great-grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, the son of Armenian parents from Lebanon, and, with his siblings, the first generation in his family to be born in the United States, in the great city of Baltimore.