Poems of Memory and Armenia
Alan Semerdjian, Alina Gregorian, & Nancy Agabian
Saturday, March 8th 2014
7pm
Berl's Poetry Shop
126A Front Street
DUMBO, Brooklyn
About the Poets:
Alina Gregorian is the author of Flying Bark, a forthcoming chapbook from Monk Books, and Flag for Adjectives, a forthcoming chapbook from Diez. Her poems have appeared in Sink Review, Boston Review, GlitterPony, and other journals. She curates a video poetry reading series at the Huffington Post, co-curates Triptych Readings, and co-edits the collaboration journal Bridge. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Nancy Agabian is the author of Princess Freak, a mixed genre collection of poems, short prose, and performance texts on sexuality and rage, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, a memoir about the influence of her Armenian family’s history on her coming-of-age. Me as her again was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize. Her essays have been published in Ararat, The Brooklyn Rail, Women Studies Quarterly, and the anthologies Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place and Time and Forgotten Bread: First Generation Armenian American Writers. Collections of her poems appear in the anthologies Birthmark and Deviation. A Fulbright scholar to Armenia for 2006-07, she is currently working on "The Fear of Large and Small Nations" a novel on the influences of nationalism, corruption, and family on personal freedom in post-Soviet Armenia. She teaches writing at Queens College and at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. In 2012, she founded Heightening Stories, a series of writing workshops based in her living room in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Writer, musician, and award-winning educator Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online publications and anthologies including Adbusters, Diagram, and Ararat. He released a chapbook of poems called An Improvised Device (Lock n Load Press) in 2005 and his first full-length book In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books) in 2009. His songs have appeared in television and film and charted on CMJ. Alan has performed and read all over North America. He currently teaches English at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, NY, writes a monthly column, music reviews, and other kinds of prose for LI Pulse, and resides in New York City’s East Village.
