Events

Event details

IALA and Mizna present the Sarkisian Workshop Series 2026: Can Storytelling Save Us?

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. More information here.

Ticket Price: $20 – General Admission; $16 – IALA Members. Purchase your tickets here.

 

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

Poems that Ingest the Difficult World with Peter Balakian

How can poems take on the difficult world—mass violence, social upheaval, the ordinary

daily flow of dysfunction and cruelty—and still maintain the necessary depth and complexity

the poem demands as a work of literary imagination. Our seminar will explore poets who have made powerful and aesthetically rich work as they have navigated the difficult world. We will discuss how these poems speak to us across time and place and make demands on our own poems.

• Date: September 20, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time

 

Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza

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.

• Date: October 18, 2026, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 8:00 PM Armenia Time

 

The World in Small Things: Writing the Ordinary in Extraordinary Times with Nur Turkmani

How do we write the everyday during turbulent times? What can a group chat, a grocery receipt, the way we drink our coffee, the sounds from a balcony, or the carvings on a tree outside our window reveal about the worlds we inhabit? The smallest details of our lives often carry histories far larger than themselves. They tell us how we love, remember, flee, endure, belong. They also reveal what we ignore or grow numb to, the ways we learn to look away.

This workshop explores how fiction and poetry transform the ordinary into something revelatory. We’ll read fiction and poetry by writers including Claire Keegan, Carolyn Forché, Toni Morrison, and Yasmin Zaher, asking how attention to objects, routines, gestures, landscapes, and sensory detail can deepen character, sharpen narrative, and open onto larger emotional, social, and historical realities without reducing them to explanation or argument.

• Date: TBA