IALA, Mizna and AAWW present the Sarkisian Workshop Series: Can storytelling save us?

2026-02-26 - 20:14

The International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), Mizna and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) 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 will include literary analysis and generative writing exercises. Designed to bring together writers from diverse backgrounds, these workshops will encourage participants to engage with the pressing issues of our time. Olivia Katrandjian Imagining Alternative Futures with Olivia Katrandjian As rising temperatures fuel environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption and conflict, it has been argued that all fiction is now climate fiction because the climate crisis affects every facet of our lives. Beyond typical dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, how can fiction allow us to contemplate alternative futures, seek justice and dream up creative approaches to combat the crisis? Participants will be encouraged to center often neglected perspectives and consider how decolonial, feminist and environmental struggles are intertwined. Date: March 29, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific | 12:00 p.m. Eastern | 8:00 p.m. Armenia Time Facilitator website: oliviakatrandjian.com Registration details to follow Diane Wilson Centering Indigenous Experiences in Climate Narratives with Diane Wilson Foundational to Indigenous culture is a worldview rooted in relationships with all other beings, a perspective that also shapes storytelling. Climate narratives from that viewpoint emphasize this relationality, accept the responsibility intrinsic to being a good relative and embed social justice at their foundation. This workshop will provide context about Dakota people and key teachings related to this worldview; in particular, the concept of Mitakuye Owasin (We Are All Related), food sovereignty and cultural recovery. Students will explore literature that embodies these teachings, as well as generative writing prompts. Date: April 19, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific | 12:00 p.m. Eastern | 8:00 p.m. Armenia Time Facilitator website: dianewilsonwords.com Registration details to follow Moheb Soliman Nature, Poetry and Environmental Collapse with Moheb Soliman Poetry has a singular capacity to capture our complex relationship with the nonhuman living world. But how can it adapt to a world fraught with threats of environmental collapse? Through ecopoetic texts and writers, as well as Moheb’s own work about the Great Lakes region, this workshop will explore how contemporary nature writers can navigate between romanticizing the natural sphere, eulogizing its death and poeticizing environmentalism. Participants will discuss and write about their experiences embodying and rendering natural-cultural spaces and reckon with human desire, humility, alienation and ambivalence in this era, when nature poetry and climate change must coexist. Date: To be announced Facilitator website: mohebsoliman.info COP17, the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, will be held in Yerevan, Armenia, in October 2026. Through the workshops above, IALA and its partners hope to inspire writers around the world to engage with and produce environmental literature. Peter Balakian 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 a poem demands as a work of literary imagination? This workshop will explore poets who have created powerful and aesthetically rich work as they have navigated the difficult world. Participants will discuss how these poems speak across time and place and make demands on their writings. Date: To be announced Facilitator website: peterbalakian.com Sarah Aziza Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza In what ways are writing practices captive to disciplines of legitimacy and legibility? How do craft choices reflect internalized hierarchies of acceptable experiences, languages and points of view? Are established practices of “good writing” and “credibility” forms of silencing? What might be excavated or liberated by rebelling against the tyrannies of “correctness” “civility” and “fact”? In this workshop, participants will consider cultural conventions around “authority” in authorship and explore how to subvert them to create new, insurgent forms. They will examine how erasure may be enacted not only in silence but also in language — and consider what has been left unsaid. The workshop will return to the body, the intuitive and the nonverbal as frontiers where writing might be discovered anew. Date: To be announced Facilitator website: sarahaziza.com Arthur Kayzakian Resisting Erasure: A Workshop on Invisibility with Arthur Kayzakian This workshop will highlight communities threatened by erasure through writing. Participants will use their invisibility as a tool to write a piece, in the genre of their choice, about how their experiences with erasure have impacted their identity. The instructor will demonstrate and facilitate lessons on erasure as a writing technique — caesura, black-out poetry, redaction and docu poetics — to give participants the tools they need to reappropriate the pain of feeling unseen. Date: To be announced Facilitator website: artkayzakian.wixsite.com/poet This workshop series is produced by the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), a global literary platform that supports and celebrates writers and translators by fostering the development and distribution of Armenian literature in the English language and in translation. Through mentorship, grants, readings, discussions and more, IALA unites and uplifts Armenian writers and fosters intercultural exchange. Partnering organizations Mizna: Since 1999, Mizna has promoted experimental approaches to art, literature and film — work that questions and expands the forms and conceptual frameworks of Arab and SWANA culture. Mizna publishes a biannual print literary and art journal, Mizna and Mizna Online, a digital platform for literary and multidisciplinary work reflecting critically on the current realities of the SWANA region and beyond. Mizna also offers readings, a film festival, film series, performances, public art commissions and community events that have featured more than 1000 local and transnational writers, filmmakers and artists. Asian American Writers Workshop: For over 30 years, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop has been dedicated to publishing and amplifying Asian diasporic literary culture. Grounded in an inclusive approach, AAWW broadens the definitions of who is a writer and who is Asian. Through a wide range of programming and its award-winning magazine, The Margins, AAWW provides a generative space for writers and readers alike. By cultivating and curating the next generation of storytellers, AAWW contributes to the continued growth and vitality of the literary community. The Sarkisian Foundation for the Arts and Engineering supports students and institutions seeking to advance ideas that elevate innovative critical thinking, design and realization of creative work. The foundation provides scholarships and grants in the arts and engineering, specifically visual arts, liberal arts, architecture and performing arts.