Join Glendale Library, Arts & Culture and Lory Bedikian, winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry as she discusses her latest book title Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body.
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self. Using asestina, syllabics, prose poems, and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.
Lory Bedikian’s second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry forthcoming September 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press and her first collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Several of Bedikian’s poems received the First Prize Award in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry as part of the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is published in TinHouse, Gulf Coast, The Los Angeles Review, BOULEVARD, The Adroit Journal, Orion, wildness, and was featured on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Her poem “The Mechanic,” is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020. Bedikian’s manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. New work appears in Massachusetts Review’s “Revisiting WOMAN: An Issue, 50 Years Later.” Bedikian earned an MFA from the University of Oregon. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Douglas Manuel is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023).
This program is in conjunction with Be the Change Series. Be The Change events will build collective understanding of systemic racism, elevate the voices and stories of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and inspire our community to be the change.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Special Events | Author Talk |
TAGS: | Special Events | Authortalk | Adults |
Library Connection @ Adams Square is a small library which connects the community with the vast resources and services available through the Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Department. We have established partnerships with community organizations to offer weekly Citizenship workshops, weekly Literacy Conversation classes and drop-in parenting workshops for families with children who have special needs.
Library Connection also offers a wide range of programs for Children, Teens and Adults. We offer weekly toddler programs and school age STEAM programming. We have a monthly book to movie club, rotating MakerSpace which highlights our 3D printer, Cricut machine and other crafty endeavors. Please see our monthly Library calendars for upcoming events.
