2012 readings

Lola Koundakjian has three upcoming poetry readings thus far for 2012.

The first will be Tuesday, February 7th, 8pm  at The Local Word, 839 W 181st St, (between Pinehurst Ave and Cabrini Blvd) New York, NY 10033 in Washington Heights, NY; the second will be on  Sunday, March 4 a reading for NoMAA award winner; and the third, Saturday, March 17th, 6pm at Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street, in the West Village.

Reading in Los Angeles

Reading in Long Island, New York

On Saturday, October 8th, around 8:30 PM, I will be reading at the Sip This café, 
with musician Claudio Muller on vibraphone.
Sip This Café, 
64 Rockaway Ave 
Valley Stream, NY 11580

Reading at the Cornelia Street Café

Last night, October 6, I had the surprise of being invited on stage by Robin Hirsch, the Café's owner, during that evening's Artist Salon. I read "Moods" for a wonderfully close-knit audience of artists.

Reading at the Ceres Gallery, New York City

Next reading will be at the Ceres Gallery, located in the Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday, Sept 24, 3pm.

Ceres Gallery

547 West 27th St 

Suite 201 

New York, NY 10001

http://www.ceresgallery.org/

Reading at Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Church

On Sunday, September 18th, I will be reading my first commissioned poem at the Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Church in Washington Heights. The parish council is celebrating the 25th anniversary of a Virgin and Child painting by Simon Samsonian. The painting is a Charkhapan, which means it keeps the evil away. The church is a pilgrimage site since the painting was installed and blessed by the then patriarch of Constantinople.

Reading at the 1st New York Poetry Festival

Nancy Agabian, Lola Koundakjian and Alan Semerdjian reading at the 1st New York Poetry Festival

Sunday 1pm, on Stage 2.

Free and open to the public, the first annual New York Poetry Festival (NYPF) on Governors Island will showcase all of the different formats, aesthetics, and personalities of New York City reading series and collectives, in one place at one time, July 30th and 31st.

With over 30 reading series, 100 poets and tons of vendors on board, the festival intends to create branches between disparate poetry communities, and other artists and artisans, by bringing poetry out of the dark bars and universities and by placing it amongst sycamores on an island in the sun.

For more information about The Poetry Society of New York and updates about the festival, please visit www.tpsny.org.

Bob Holman will serve as our Grand Marshal

Reading at the New York Poetry Festival Pre-Fest Party and Fundraiser

Time
Thursday, July 21 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Location
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY


I will be reading a long piece at this event. 

The invitation to this event states:
This Thursday night the curators of more than 30 of New York City's best poetry reading will have their moment in the spotlight. We have asked them to come and read for us and the city they so passionately serve. We will be gathering with the goal of raising very necessary funds to make The First Annual New York City Poetry Festival, www.tpsny.org , the most amazing poetry event this city has ever seen.

Reading at ABOVE THE BRIDGE series - Monday, July 18, 2011

Reading at WordUp Bookstore in Washington Heights

THURSDAY, JULY 7
7-9pm

Here and There: Travel Readings with Led Black, Lola Koundakjian, Iskandar Andrews, and Veronica Liu. Uptown Collective’s editor in chief Led Black will read from his work in progress, DR Travelogue. Poet Lola Koundakjian, a 2011 NoMAA grantee, will be reading a selection of travel pieces—some real, some imaginary—with a sprinkling of poems about food and drinks. Iskandar Andrews will read from Drinking and Driving in Urumqi, a seriocomic travelogue/meditation recounting immersive misadventures and multiple baptisms by culture shock, linguistic overload, and corn vodka into the diverse culture of the city of Urumqi, Xinjiang Province, Peoples Republic of China.Veronica Liu will read from her novel Your Chinese Tea is Getting Cold!, written with 2010 support from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA), JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ).




WORD UP
4157 Broadway @ 176 St.
Monday-Friday 4-9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12-4pm

Reading at the WordUp [pop-up] bookstore

Heads up, NYC, I will be reading with travel writers in a program entitled "a night of travel and voyage", on July 7, 2011, 7pm.

Location:
Word Up
a community bookshop in Northern Manhattan
4157 Broadway @ 175 Street

For more details, see
www.wordupbooks.com

2011 Northern Manhattan Arts Stroll

From 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. on June 14^th,  Sunday Best Curator  Patricia Eakins  will guest-host a reading by the 2011 NoMAA Literary Grantees. The reading is at Our Savior’s Atonement,  178 Bennett Avenue (at 189th Street). The readers are Dina Piera Di Donato Salazar, Christine Toy Johnson, Lola Koundakjian, Danielle Lazarin, Will MacAdams, and Amir Parsa. The event is free, and refreshments will be served at a reception after to honor the writers.

Veronica Liu, the director of WHFR, is creating a pop-up book store for the Art Stroll.  It is called Word Up, and it is conceived as a multi-language community bookshop for Northern Manhattan. Word Up will be at 4157 Broadway @ 175 Street from June 17 - July 14. Store hours will be week days from four to nine and weekends from 12-4, with some adjustments for special events.

Washington Heights Arts Stroll - June 2011

I will be reading as part of the UPTOWN VOICES: NoMAA Literary Grantees program, Tuesday, June 14 from 6:30-8pm, at the Cornerstone Center, 178 Bennett Avenue at 189th Street, New York, NY.

For more information, see www.artstroll.com, or call NoMAA's offices 212-568-4396.

My book will be available at the Pop-Up Bookstore, from June 14-20th, at 3855 Broadway at 161 Street. 

Sunday Best Reading Series, March 6, 2011

A Benefit for NoMAA (the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance)

Sunday, March 6th at 4:00 p.m. 

Readings by literary artists who have received Individual Artist Grants from NoMAA for 2011

Christine Toy Johnson

Lola Koundakjian

Danielle Lazarin

Will MacAdams

Suggested donation of $7 includes free drinks and snacks

Reception after to meet the composers and writers

Sunday Best Reading Series
Performances by fiction writers, poets, dramatists, memoir writers and spoken-word composers
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens
Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street

NoMAA’s mission is to cultivate, support and promote the works of artists and arts organizations in Northern Manhattan. Their programs and services include the Regrant Program, Technical Assistance Institute, Uptown Arts Stroll, NoMAA Gallery and Artists’ Salon. More atwww.nomaanyc.org.

Christine Toy Johnson is an award-winning playwright, actor and filmmaker whose plays have been developed at such places as the Roundabout Theatre and Crossroads Theatre. The Christine Toy Johnson Portfolio, an anthology of her work, is included in the Library of Congress Asian Pacific American Performing Arts Collection. www.christinetoyjohnson.com

Lola Koundakjian serves on the editorial board of Ararat, an Armenian-American Literary Quarterly. Her poetry has appeared on the web and in print in the US, Canada, Armenia and Lebanon. For the past 20 years, Lola has organized evenings dedicated to the Dead Armenian Poets’ Society and since 2006 has produced and edited text and audio for the

Armenian Poetry Project. She has read in venues in NY, RI and LA, and her work was translated into Spanish for the 20th International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, where she read in July 2010. http://Armenian-poetry.blogspot.com

Danielle Lazarin’s fiction has appeared on FiveChapters.com, in Boston Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Oberlin College's creative writing program, she has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. She recently moved back to her native New York, where she is at work on her first novel.

Will MacAdams creates original plays inspired by local stories. Recently, he worked with farmers, farm workers, dancers, and other residents of Warwick, NY to create Water and Stone, a performance poem about land and community change. Past projects include Eye to Eye, an original play about racism and youth-police relations, created with future police officers and young people from New Haven, CT; and Cruising the Divide, an interview-inspired play about race, class, and the celebration of the Kentucky Derby. He is a past recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation's Next Generation Leadership Fellowship. He teaches theater in City College's Center for Worker Education.

*********

http://sundaybestreadingseries.wordpress.com/

Sunday Best Curator, Patrizia Eakins, 212-923-7800 x1342

Also Coming Soon to The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens:

April 3rd at 4:00: High Jinks!: Musico-Literary satirists Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine. Also appearing: Duo Fortuna--Charles Ramsey and Leslie Upchurch. $7. 

The Accidental Observer is now available for sale

Lola Koundakjian's first poetry collection is now available for purchase. 


Praise for The Accidental Observer


The poetry reading community owes a huge debt of gratitude to Lola Koundakjian for her years of service to the art, making the work of Armenian poets, writers of Armenian ancestry in many languages, available to readers world-wide with her Armenian Poetry Project. Now, we meet Lola herself in three languages…and it’s about time!
— Diana Der-Hovanessian




Lola Koundakjian's first collection reveals a curious and prescient mind roaming the landscapes of our collective illusions – and disillusionments. Through her spare style and a measured economy of language, she manages to decipher the banality of the everyday on one page, and, on the next, dissect the anatomy of suffering. Insightful and poignant, this is the work of a meticulous observer, and an acutely aware consciousness.
— Amir Parsa




These poems of longing and grace are the kind we pass from friend to friend. How wonderful to find them in three languages, each proclaiming their own bright joy.
— William Michaelian




These poems tread lightly but so perceptively. In delicate language and in three tongues, the poet takes us on a winding journey, a walk through “the dew intertwined with mist” on the path leading to and from love, to and from a lover who is now there, now absent. This theme is played out sensitively against backdrops of New York, with echos of the Middle East and Armenia sounding sotto voce. A vignette of a garden on West 87th street with a mulberry tree and “crushed ripe mulberries” evokes loss, love and childhood. From this miniature of New York, Koundakjian shows us far places freshly — Firenze and Toscana, afternoon coffee in Spain and an evocation of Morocco. The Armenian and English texts are transpositions of her perceptions into the different cultures, each rewarding in its own modality and in the meaning to be found in the place between them.
— Michael E. Stone




“y desapareces/ dejándome recuerdos/ bocados apenas” así inicia Lola Koundakjian su potencia evocadora. Así, dando nombres a los gestos íntimos de un pasado que se le hace pedazos en la memoria. Así, sus poemas, como un libro de viajes, recorren las sensaciones en imágenes que agregan futuro a lo ya sucedido. Olores, sabores y miradas que conforman memoriales cuyo objetivo es transformar el espacio de escritura en espacio conmemorativo. La densidad de Koundakjian reside en ofrecer ternura a la resistencia, en acordar una cita agradecida con sus raíces produciendo su propia perpetuación. El rito de la palabra hace justicia, nombra el destino del poema junto a su lector; su calidad de testigo.
— Ana Arzoumanian


Lola Koundakjian continues to open doors with her passion for poetry. These spare but heartfelt pieces have several faces and textures because of the work she has done with their translations. An ambitious project that only a poetry advocate such as Lola can deliver.
— Armine Iknadossian




Lola Koundakjian goes after real moments, and she does so quickly, concisely, masterfully--as if she is in panic of losing that rare afternoon light or the playful shadows cast over Central Park by the accidental cumulus clouds. She's like those rare poet-photographers that must work swiftly if they want to capture the moment just right.
— Shahé Mankerian


“It is hard to find a better advocate for poetry across
culture and time than Lola Koundakjian, and this
collection is good hard evidence.”
— Alan Semerdjian


“A trilingual volume of nostalgic reflections on the
four seasons, filled with exotic aromas and flavours,
drawing from the East and West, from Armenia and New
York, from beyond and within, and in search of our
common destiny.”
— Alan Whitehorn

NoMAA ceremonies on January 31, 2011

Tonight I received a grant from the Northern Manhattan Arts Association, NoMAA. I was invited to read a poem, and Advice to an Armenian Poet made its debut.

Above The Bridge

Our community has two wonderful reading groups. Above the Bridge is the second one I have discovered. I will be reading with them tomorrow evening at 8:00PM. 


Here's the ad:




Baby, it's cold outside!  Come join us for our January Above the
Bridge Writers Cafe.  This month's theme -- Sex/Love/Passion -- is
sure to heat you up.

Monday, January 31, 2010 at 8PM

Featuring the writings of:

John Affleck
David Breitkopf
Risa Ehrilch
Kirby Fields
Lola Koundakjian
Veronica Liu


The Red Room Lounge
1 Bennett Avenue
$5 cover (cash only)

RSVP: abovethebridge@gmail.com