Sarkisian Workshop Series to feature Sarah Aziza
The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) and Mizna will hold the fifth installment of the Sarkisian Workshop Series: “Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies,” with Sarah Aziza. The virtual workshop will take place on Oct. 18, 2026, at 9 a.m. Pacific | noon Eastern | 8 p.m. Armenia time. Ticket information is available here.
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, participants 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 nonverbal as frontiers where we might discover our writing again, anew.
Sarah Aziza (she/هي) is a Palestinian American writer, translator and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of “The Hollow Half,” published in April 2025. Winner of the Palestine Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Arab American Book Award Honorable Mention and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, “The Hollow Half” is a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism and the American dream.
Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Guardian and The Nation, among other publications as well as numerous translations. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, United States Artists, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa. She currently lives on unceded Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land.
Suggested reading
- “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”, by Fargo Tbakhi
- Perfect Victims, by Mohammed el-Kurd
- “Two Poems from Nima Hasan”, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
- “Prologue for Now – Gaza”, by Dionne Brand
- The Hollow Half, by Sarah Aziza
- As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- “I Am Not Your Translator”, by Fady Joudah
- “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, by Audre Lorde
- Interview with Dionne Brand (Between the Covers Podcast)
- “Can You”, by Jorie Graham, featured in To 2040
- Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
The Sarkisian Workshop Series 2026: Can Storytelling Save Us? is organized by IALA and Mizna. Funded by the Sarkisian Foundation for the Arts and Engineering, the series consists of six writing workshops that include literary analysis and generative writing exercises. Designed to bring together writers from diverse backgrounds, these workshops encourage writers to engage with the pressing issues of our time.
Information about the full series is available on IALA’s website. Titles connected with the series are also listed on IALA’s Bookshop.org storefront.
