IALA to Feature ‘Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sar

The International Armenian Literary Alliance and Mizna will launch the fifth installment of the Sarkisian Workshop Series: “Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies with Sarah Aziza.” The virtual workshop will take place on October 18, 2026, at 9 a.m. PST. Click here to purchase tickets.

In what ways are our writing practices captive to disciplines of legitimacy and legibility? How do our craft choices reflect internalized hierarchies of acceptable experiences, languages, and points of view? Are established practices of “good writing” and “credibility” actually forms of silencing? What would we excavate, what would we liberate, if we rebelled against the tyrannies of “correctness” “civility” and “fact”?

Workshop participants will consider cultural conventions around “authority” in authorship, and consider how they might subvert these to create new, insurgent forms. They will ponder the ways erasure may be enacted not only in silence, but in language—and dare to consider what we have left unsaid. They will return to the body, the intuitive, and the non-verbal as frontiers where they might discover their writing again, anew.

Sarah Aziza (she/هي) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of “The Hollow Half,” published in April 2025. Winner of the Palestine Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, Arab American Book Award Honorable Mention, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, “The Hollow Half” is a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in “The New Yorker,” “The Paris Review,” “Best American Essays,” “The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine,” “Mizna,” “The Guardian,” and “The Nation,” among other publications as well as numerous translations. The recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, United States Artists, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked throughout Southwest Asia and North Africa. She currently lives on unceded Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land where she makes, learns and works towards liberation for Palestine and beyond.

Recommended reads for the worship include:

• “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” by Fargo Tbakhi
• “Perfect Victims,” by Mohammed el-Kurd
• “Two Poems from Nima Hasan,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine
• “Prologue for Now – Gaza,” by Dionne Brand
• “The Hollow Half,” by Sarah Aziza
• “As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance,” by Leanne Betasomake Simpson
• “I Am Not Your Translator,” by Fady Joudah
• “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” by Audre Lorde
• Interview with Dionne Brand (Between the Covers Podcast)
• “Can You,” by Jorie Graham, featured in “To 2040”
• “Minor Detail,” by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

“The Sarkisian Workshop Series 2026: Can Storytelling Save Us?” is brought to you by IALA and Mizna. Funded by the Sarkisian Foundation for the Arts and Engineering, the series offers six writing workshops that include literary analysis and generative writing exercises. Designed to bring together writers from diverse backgrounds, these workshops encourage writers to engage with the pressing issues of our time.

Explore the full series and read along with it by purchasing titles at IALA’s Bookshop.org storefront.