The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center are pleased to invite you to the final installment of their 2024 reading series, Literary Lights, featuring Lory Bedikian, author of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry winner Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body. Bedikian will be joined by renowned poet, essayist and professor Brian Turner. The event, co-sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press and Prairie Schooner, will take place virtually on September 21, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific | 1:00 p.m. Eastern | 9:00 p.m. Armenia time. Register here.
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure and the self. Using a sestina, syllabics, prose poems and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer) and the excavation of memory — whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.
“A capacious lyric narrative, of emigration, of history, of interiority, polyglot, with a memory reaching as far as Aleppo and as near as today’s biopsy results.” — Marilyn Hacker, author of Calligraphies: Poems
“Lory Bedikian has created a monument of rage in facing the march of calamities against a life… Jagadakeer’s world will be very disconcerting — yet rewarding — to readers of this exquisitely composed work.” — Ed Roberson, winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and author of To See the Earth Before the End of the World
“A consummate craftsperson, Bedikian writes lushly, with power and force, creating images we cannot unsee. Open this book and read her poem ‘Before the Elegy, Speak to Her,’ and see what I mean.” — Dorianne Laux, author of Only As the Day Is Long
Lory Bedikian is the author of The Book of Lamenting, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She was recently chosen for the Poets & Writers “Get the Word Out” Poetry Cohort 2024. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion and wildness and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work also appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and five collections of poetry — from Here, Bullet to The Wild Delight of Wild Things. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres. A musician, he’s written and recorded albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and American Undertow with The Retro Legion. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic and Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever. Learn more by visiting www.brianturner.org
Literary Lights is a monthly reading series organized, for the second year in a row, by IALA, NAASR and the Zohrab Information Center. Each event — held online — features a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Read along with the series by purchasing titles from the IALA Bookstore or the NAASR Bookstore.
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