Literary Lights 2026: Featuring Sarah Ignatius

Literary Lights 2026 resumes this fall with an event featuring Sarah Ignatius, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, in conversation with award-winning writer and multidisciplinary artist Dana Mashoian Walrath. The hybrid event, cosponsored by the Belmont Public Library, will take place on September 22, 2026, 7:30 PM Eastern Time at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building – 395 Concord Avenue, Belmont, Massachusetts. If you can’t make it in person, you can register to attend on Zoom or watch the livestream.

The year is 1915. Fourteen-year-old Arakel dreams of traveling the Silk Road with his two best friends—until the Armenian Genocide tears his world apart. Forced into exile across Syria, he must rely on strangers he once considered enemies to survive. With an elegance that reaffirms our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an often-overlooked period of history and will resonate with today’s challenges. The Kaleidoscope of Destiny will be released by Koehler Books on September 22.

Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah B. Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and non-profit executive director. Along the way, she was a kids’ tennis instructor in Washington, D.C.; a hamburger bun toaster and cashier at Mr. & Mrs. Bartley’s Burger Cottage in Cambridge, MA; and a rural community organizer in southeastern Montana. Her writing has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women, and she was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is the granddaughter of Armenians uprooted from their ancestral homeland in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s and lives in Massachusetts with her husband.

Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia journey, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. Her comics, art, essays, and poetry have been featured by The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and NPR. Dana lives in Vermont. Her graphic narrative The Book of Genocides will be released by Harvard University Press on September 8, 2026.