Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST

Please click here to register for the Zoom presentation

FEATURED SPEAKERS:

Gregory Djanikian, award-winning author of Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems. Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. For many years, he was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of seven collections of poetry from Carnegie Mellon, most recently of which is Sojourners of the In-Between. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, and in many anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House). Learn more by visiting gregorydjanikian.com. 

Susan Barba, New York Review Books senior editor and writer. Susan Barba is the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide (2022), winner of the 2023 American Horticultural Society award, and the author of Fair Sun (2017) and geode (2020), a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and her poems have been translated into Armenian, German, Romanian, and Swedish. Learn more by visiting susanbarba.net.

Written over several decades, Nostalgia for the Future takes for its many subjects romantic love and its difficulties, the horrors of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the émigré experience and the joys and struggles of acculturation, the allure of landscapes and vast distances, the polarity of our material life on earth and our longing for what is ethereal and elusive, all in tones that are humorous, elegiac, contemplative, lyrical, and suffused with a gratitude for the mysteriousness and wonder of life itself.

Literary Lights 2025 is a monthly reading series. Each event—held online or in-person—will feature a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Keep an eye on our website and socials for the exact dates of each event. Please click here if you would like to purchase Nostalgia for the Future from NAASR's Bookstore. 

CO-SPONSORS:

NAASR

IALA

Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center