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Nanor Kenderian

Biography

Nanor Kenderian is Armenian, Lebanese, and now American. Today she is passionate about Armenian diaspora literature and about scholarship, though neither has always been the case.

As a child Nanor was greatly moved by the American classic A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle), which is about children uprooted from their homes and transported to an alternate universe, for Nanor and her mother escaped the Lebanese civil war and came to America in 1988. But her father had disappeared and many difficult years followed. Four years at an Armenian school left Nanor with an aversion to everything Armenian. By the time she graduated from high school, she did not even want to go to college. A family friend invited her to visit Armenia and Lebanon, but Nanor returned, "bewildered. I could neither relate to Armenia nor to my birthplace Ainjar, an all-Armenian Lebanese village."

Nanor regained her enthusiasm and her focus at Fordham University, where she won the Katie Frazer Prize for her outstanding senior thesis on Armenian literature of the diaspora. She edited the Comparative Literature Journal of Fordham University and is now translating Armenian poetry and a novel for inclusion in Columbia University professor Marc Nichanian's series Writers of Disaster. Dr. Nichanian predicts that Nanor will become one of the "true ambassadors of a dispersed people that has no other way of self-representation in the modern world."

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