Nancy Agabian

Background

About Nancy Agabian

Nancy Agabian is an author, teacher, and literary organizer dedicated to socially-engaged writing. She works in the spaces between race, ethnicity, cultural identity, feminism and queer identity. For close to thirty years she has taught within academic and public communities in Los Angeles, New York, and Yerevan, Armenia. Nancy has an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. She currently teaches in the Writing Program at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and though her own series of community-based writing workshops that that focus on social issues as well as craft, offered online. She is the author of Princess Freak a mixed genre collection of poems, short prose, and performance texts and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (2008) a memoir which was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize. She was recently awarded the 2021 Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. A completed novel,"The Fear of Large and Small Nations", about an abusive queer relationship between the Armenian homeland and its diaspora was a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Nancy's work has been recently published in Pangyrus, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Hye-Phen Magazine, Kweli Journal, Queering Yerevan, Women Studies Quarterly, and the award-winning anthology Fierce: Essays by and about Dauntless Women. Collections of her poems appear in the anthologies Birthmark and Deviation. Nancy has written and performed several one-woman shows, which have been presented internationally - in Geneva, Milan and Yerevan. With Ann Perich, she formed the folk-punk duo Guitar Boy and released a CD, Freaks Like Me.