Events

Event details

Join us for a reading that convenes Armenian and Palestinian writers to denounce the normalization of genocidal violence, in solidarity with those under siege in Gaza. Through the reading of poems, fiction, and personal essays, this event will address interlocking historical injustices affecting Palestinians and Armenians. It’s staged in opposition to Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, antisemitism, and anti-Armenian racism, in recognition that there can be no justice until all are free.

Featuring readings by Nancy Agabian, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sophia Armen, Micaela Kaibni Raen, Mai Serhan

WHEN: December 10, 2023 at 9:30 AM Pacific | 11:30 AM Central | 12:30 PM Eastern | 7:30 PM Palestine | 9:30 PM Armenia
WHERE: Virtual
Registration required

This reading is co-hosted by the International Armenian Literary Alliance, PalFest, RAWI, Mizna, Fikra, and Armenian-American Action Network.

The reading will also serve as a fundraiser for Palestine Legal and for All for Armenia

Find more events and resources for Gaza at our page, Toward a Free Palestine

About the readers

Nancy Agabian (Co-Organizer)

Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. Her recent novel “The Fear of Large and Small Nations” was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. She is the author of Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (Aunt Lute Books, 2008), a memoir that was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books, 2000), a collection of poetry and performance texts.

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian (Co-Organizer)

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian-born writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA. She was a 2021 visiting Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College in the Department of Art and Art History. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in 2022. Her writing and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Meghan Markle’s Archetypes, AI & Society, and in the UT Press collection, We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora. 

Sophia Armen 

Sophia Armen is a community organizer and writer, born and raised in Los Angeles. She is the Co-Director of Armenian-American Action Network and The Feminist Front. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Armenian Weekly, The Electronic Intifada, and in We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, an anthology of essays with University of Texas Press. She is a descendant of genocide survivors from Kharpert, Hadjin, Istanbul and Van.

Nancy Kricorian

Nancy Kricorian is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and All the Light There Was. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Rutgers, Yale, and New York University, as well as for Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools. She participated in the 2010 Palestine Festival of Literature and taught at the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit in 2011. Her new novel about Armenians in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War will be published by Red Hen Press in 2025.

Micaela Kaibni Raen

Micaela Kaibni Raen is a Palestinian American queer femme-dyke, mother, multi-genre writer, visual artist, and activist. She grew up in the Little Arabia community in California and graduated from Chapman University. During that time, she became a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., ACT UP! and Queer Nation. She has been a community organizer for over 35 years in North America and is committed to international human rights, especially that of Indigenous and displaced peoples, women, LGBTIQ communities and those affected by HIV+/AIDS. Her work appears in Bint el Nas; Mizna; Koukash Review;Rowayat Literary Journal; Yellow Medicine Review; The Poetry of Arab Women; A Different Path; El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Arab and Arabophone Anthology; and Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora.

Mai Serhan

Mai Serhan is Palestinian-Egyptian writer, editor and translator. She earned her MA in Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. An extract from her forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, was a finalist for the Narratively Memoir Prize and her poetry collection, CAIRO: the undelivered letters, won her the Centre for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award 2022. Visit www.maiserhan.com to find more on Mai’s work.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has lived the experiences of first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian and she is fluent in Arabic and English. Lena writes poetry, essays and translations. She is the author of three books of poetry: Water and Salt (Red Hen Press), for which she won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry, Kaan and Her Sisters (July 2023), the 2022 Editors’ Selection by Trio House Press, and Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024), which was chosen by poet Adrian Matejka for the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. She has also published two poetry chapbooks: Arab in Newsland,  winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize and Letters from the Interior (diode editions, 2019).

 

We are raising funds for:

Palestine Legal

The mission of Palestine Legal is to bolster the Palestine solidarity movement by challenging efforts to threaten, harass and legally bully activists into silence and inaction. The organization provides legal advice, Know Your Rights trainings, advocacy and litigation support to college students, grassroots activists and affected communities who stand for justice in Palestine. Palestine Legal also monitors incidents of suppression to expose trends in tactics to silence Palestine activism.

All for Armenia

All for Armenia is guided by the values of humanitarianism, respect, transparency, compassion, and hope. Since the start of the 2020 Artsakh War, we have provided nutrition, warm clothing, and hygiene products for the refugee families of Artsakh. As of November 10, 2020, most of these families are refugees indefinitely. Our mission has evolved into a long-term, sustainable form of aid for not only these families, but their communities at large that extends beyond basic needs.