Role: Author

Author of Princess Freak, a collection of poems and performance art texts, Nancy Agabian has created and produced several one-woman shows and also collaborated with Ann Perich to form the folk-punk duo Guitar Boy; their CD, Freaks Like Me, was released in 2000. She received a three-year fellowship to attend Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Division in Nonfiction, where she worked on Me as her again, and graduated in 2003. After going to Armenia in 2006 on a Fulbright Scholarship, Agabian now continues to live in New York City and teaches at Queens College.

Nancy 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 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.

Nancy Mehagian has been involved with food and healing since 1969, when she opened the first vegetarian restaurant on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. A native of Phoenix, Arizona, she attended USC and graduated with a degree in English Literature from Arizona State University. With a passionate interest in the diets and customs of those who live close to the earth, Nancy has traveled extensively. In 1975 Mary Burmeister, the only living master of the ancient Japanese healing art of Jin Shin Jyutsu, became her life-long mentor. Since 1978, Nancy has maintained an active Massage Therapy and Jin Shin Jyutsu practice in Los Angeles. She accompanied Quincy Jones on his Jook Joint Tour and was the Massage Therapist for the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over World Tour.Nancy Mehagian has previously published a vegetarian cookbook for children, Supernatural, lectured at health conventions, catered for celebrities and taught gourmet cooking classes, creating cuisine that is healthy, international and authentic. Nancy lives and cooks in Los Angeles with her dog Cisco. She is currently at work on another culinary memoir, On the Table, chronicling her decades-long career cooking and massaging in Hollywood.