About Tamar Marie Boyadjian
TMB is a poet, fantasy author, essayist, translator, educator, and editor. She is the author of it is what it is (Yerevan: Antares), a book of concrete poetry in Western Armenian and the first book of poetry to be published in the language by a US born author. She is also the author of the first fantasy series to appear in Western Armenian, The Mepe & the Dragon (Los Angeles: Arpi Publishing, 2024).
TMB is also a medievalist and a lover of the medieval world. She pursued this passion and earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2010. She has published and lectured extensively on the premodern Mediterranean, particularly drawing attention to the prominent place of the medieval Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Her monograph, The City Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2018) was the recipient of the NAASR Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies.
Her creative expressions, think-pieces, and scholarly interventions have also been published globally in many journals, periodicals, and anthologies including: Hyperallergic, Wasafiri, and Cambridge University Press. Her work has also been performed or installed in places such as the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA), the Masonic Temple Detroit, the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts, Motto Berlin, and other places around the world.
TMB is also a celebrated translator and an avid advocate for promoting the forgotten place of women authors in Armenian literary history. She translates, lectures, and writes around Armenian women from the premodern to the contemporary period, focusing on how their work intersects with questions around language, trauma, and the place of these women in their respective societies. She also writes around questions of preservation, education, and mentorship, particularly in light of the endangered status of Western Armenian, while also working towards the global advancement of authors of endangered languages. Her recent creative book around this theme—a drop of woman: unnamed, unwritten—will be released in 2025.
Her work as an editor is also quite extensive. She has served as the guest editor of two out of three extant volumes of contemporary Armenian literature in translation into English: makukachu (Ingnakir, 2017), and unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest [Absinthe: World Literature in Translation] (University of Michigan Press, 2017). She has also served authors and international and local presses as an editor, writing coach, and consultant for a number of books of translation, trade publications, academic monographs, and creative projects. From 2020-2024, she was the Editor-in-Chief of the foremost periodical of Armenology in the Western Hemisphere, the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies.
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