Literary Lights 2024: Featuring Lory Bedikian

Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self. Using a sestina, syllabics, prose poems, and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.

Lory Bedikian is is the author of The Book of Lamenting, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She was recently chosen for the Poets & Writers “Get the Word Out” Poetry Cohort 2024. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion, wildness, and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her work also appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and five collections of poetry— from Here, Bulletto The Wild Delight of Wild Things. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres. A musician, he’s written and recorded albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and American Undertow with The Retro Legion. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

Literary Lights is a monthly reading series organized, for the second year in a row, by IALA, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event—held online—features a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Read along with the series by purchasing titles from the IALA Bookstore (https://bookshop.org/shop/IALA) or the NAASR Bookstore (https://naasr.org/collections/naasr-bookstore).