Lebanon-born Armenian poet, editor and
sculptor Lola Koundakjian guest leads tonight’s PoemAlley gathering at
Curley’s, sharing selections from The Accidental Observer, Advice to a Poet (an illustrated bilingual Finalist at the 2012 Orange Book Prize, Armenia excerpted here), her 20-plus years’ organizing of events dedicated to the Dead Armenian Poets’ Society and other projects.
A participant of many domestic and international poetry
festivals, Lola has appeared at events in California, Massachusetts, Rhode
Island, Connecticut, as well as Manhattan’s Cornelia
Street Café and the
first New York Poetry Festival held in 2011; last year she was invited to the
Second Festival Internacional de Poesía, in Lima, Peru and the
first Mamilla
International Poetry Festival in Ramallah, West Bank and will appear at the Trois-Rivières poetry festival
in Canada in October.
Lola is also a pronounced presence
online and in associated media, with work appearing in alpialdelapalabra (Argentina), TheLiterary Groong (University of Southern California), Mediterranean.nu (Sweden)
and UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry (Chicago).
You can listen here
to “She Sent it With Love” (part of the “Above the Bridge” series, recorded
live in 2011 at Ceres Gallery in Chelsea), a musing on how the preparation of a meal can prove as
faithful a conduit of emotion and experience across vast distances as a letter
or Skype conversation.
Hiroshima digital storytelling, Bowery Poetry Club (2010) |
Genocide victims, Erzurum (1895) |
XX Festival Internacional de Poesía, Colombia (2010) |
Embodying her reverence for the transmission and retention of human experience and observation with an almost anthropological zeal is StoryCorps, a traveling non-profit that offers free audio recording services of life recollections shared between family members, couples, life-long friends and spouses. Below is an animation based on two of eight siblings’ account of how their strict father’s response to learning that the oldest was gay affected their childhoods:
Find out more about this program at their website, www.storycorps.org.
Lola’s poetry
and articles have been published worldwide in The Enchanting Verses Literary Review (Allahabad,
India), Pakin (Beruit), Horizon Weekly (Montreal), Poetic
Justice Press, Fornix
(Lima) and this year’s Poems
for The Hazara: A Multilingual Poetry Anthology and Collaborative Poem by 125 Poets from 68 Countries, an anthology edited by Kamran Mir Hazar (Full Page Publishing).
Winner of grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts
Alliance and, most recently, the Naji Naaman literary prize in Lebanon, Lola has been editor of the multi-lingual Armenian Poetry Project since 2006.
Following attaining
her M.A. from Columbia University, Lola presented academic papers in
several Armenian Studies and Middle East Studies Association conferences, many
of which have been included in conference proceedings in the United States,
Europe and Armenia.
She has resided in New York City since 1979. You can find out much more about, her work and activities at her website, www.lolakoundakjian.com and at her blog, http://lolakoundakjian.wordpress.com/.
She has resided in New York City since 1979. You can find out much more about, her work and activities at her website, www.lolakoundakjian.com and at her blog, http://lolakoundakjian.wordpress.com/.
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