Glendale Library, Arts & Culture hosts Nancy Kricorian in conversation with Shahé Mankerian to discuss her latest book “The Burning Heart of the World” on Wednesday, April 2 from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the auditorium at Central Library. 

In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s “The Burning Heart of the World” tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of “Zabelle,” her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, “The Burning Heart of the World” is a sweeping saga that takes readers on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

Publishing to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War and the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Nancy Kricorian, whose grandparents were Genocide survivors, delivers “The Burning Heart of the World” as a vivid, poetic, heartbreaking novel filled with rich historical knowledge and cultural insights that inform her characters making them jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of readers.

Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post-Genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including “Zabelle,” which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals.

She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale and New York University, as well as for Teacher & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools and for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award. She lives in New York City.

Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School and the director of mentorship at the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA).