Zohrab Center director Dr. Jesse Arlen, co-translator of the recently published bilingual edition of his late sister poet Tenny Arlen’s volume To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? (Կիրքով ըսելու՝ ինչո՞ւ հոս եմ) will be joined in conversation with Susan Barba, Hagop Gulludjian and Arthur Ipek in the final installment of the Literary Lights 2025 reading series, a joint venture between the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and the Zohrab Center.

The virtual event, co-sponsored by UCLA’s Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies, Promise Armenian Institute, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History and University of Michigan’s Center for Armenian Studies, will take place on Saturday, December 6, 2025, at 9:00 AM Pacific | 12:00 PM Eastern | 9:00 PM Armenia time. Register for the Zoom here.

To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? is a bilingual (Armenian and English) edition of Tenny Arlen’s poetry, an extraordinary body of work written in a language she began learning only a few years before her passing in 2015. In addition to containing everything from the 2021 Armenian publication, the bilingual edition also contains a foreword by Jesse Arlen, three new writings by Tenny Arlen discovered among her papers, images of some of the manuscripts of her poems, and a new afterword by Arthur Ipek, which was recently awarded the Society for Armenian Studies “Best Conference Paper Prize” for 2024–2025.

Published via Tarkmaneal Press (New York), To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? is now available for purchase through the NAASR Bookstore and on Amazon.

“Hauntingly beautiful poems… A sparkling mind, mature and sophisticated well beyond her youthful years. I remember Tenny as among a handful of the most brilliant students I have encountered throughout my life.” – Sebouh David Aslanian, UCLA Professor and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History

“While respecting the classic writers, Tenny was not a slave to their style or ideas, but with that same self-confidence which was the hallmark of all her endeavors, she fashioned her own instrument to be the vessel of her thoughts. As in their own time, Zahrad and Khrakhuni opened a new path for Armenian poetry, Tenny’s creative work marks a new phase in the literary history of the Diaspora… Tenny has become a pioneer by her literary path.” – Peter Cowe, Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at UCLA

“To describe Tenny Arlen as a trailblazer would be to bestow that term upon the artist without exaggerating its definition.” – David Garyan, poet, journalist, and editor of LAdige literary journal

 

Tenny Arlen (1991–2015) is the author of the posthumous collection of poetry Կիրքով ըսելու՝ ինչո՞ւ հոս եմ (Yerevan: ARI Literature Foundation, 2021), and has been celebrated as a pioneer and trailblazer for Armenian diasporan literature as the author of the first full-length volume of creative literature published in Armenian by an American-born writer. A bilingual (Armenian and English) facing-page edition of the volume was published in 2025 by Tarkmaneal Press, with newly discovered poems and a new afterword. She earned her B.A. in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2013, where she studied Western Armenian with Dr. Hagop Gulludjian.

Dr. Jesse S. Arlen is the director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America and a postdoctoral research fellow in Armenian Christian Studies at Fordham University. He earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages & Cultures from UCLA in 2021, and his primary research area is premodern Armenian religious literature. He has taught Classical Armenian and Modern Armenian in various settings, from universities and seminaries to Armenian community organizations. He is also a published author of poetry and critical and creative prose in Western Armenian. In 2024 with Matthew Sarkisian, he co-founded Tarkmaneal Press, which to date has published 3 books: a bilingual edition of an early–eighteenth-century Armenian prayer scroll (2024), Odes of Saint Nersess the Graceful (2024), and Tenny Arlen’s To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? (2025).

Susan Barba is the author of two poetry collections, Fair Sunand geode, which was a finalist for the New England Book Awards and the Massachusetts Book Awards. She is a co-editor, with Victoria Rowe, of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian, and the editor of American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, which won the 2023 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her poems and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, PN Review, and elsewhere. She earned her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. She works as a senior editor for New York Review Books.

Hagop Gulludjian is a Senior Lecturer of Armenian Studies at the UCLA Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department, and the inaugural holder of the Kachigian Lectureship in Armenian Language and Culture. He holds a doctorate of Letters and an MBA. He has researched and published on medieval Armenian poetry and Diaspora Armenian literature, heritage language and language vitality, as well as on interactions between virtuality, culture and diasporas. He has an extensive background in publishing and IT, having co-founded Argentina’s Internet2 Consortium and having assisted both private and government entities on technology policy issues.

Born in New York, Arthur Ipek is a graduate student and special projects coordinator and research associate at the Krikor Zohrab Information Center. After graduating from Townsend Harris High School, he went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in psychology and linguistics, as well as a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Graduate Center of the City University of ew York. Currently, he is pursuing a second masters at New York University, focusing on social and consumer psychology. In addition, he has been active as a literary scholar for close to a decade, focusing on making Armenian literature accessible for a wider general literature. He has presented papers at conferences held at the University of Michigan, UCLA, and most recently NAASR, and published articles and poems in the Armenian-language press such as the Istanbul-based newspapers Marmara and Jamanak and the Beirut-based Hamazgayin Pakine literary journal.