Role: Author

Karenn Chutjian Presti has been teaching music to children for twenty years and has served on the faculties of the Munich International School, Artetonal Schule für Musik, Pasadena Conservatory of Music, Lark Musical Society, and San Domenico School. She is currently on the faculty of the Herb Albert School of Music at UCLA, where she teaches languages and musical interpretation to singers, and gives classes on Armenian music and on nationalism in music.

Kara-Darvish (Hakob Genjian) was an Armenian Futurist poet who lived and worked mainly in Tiflis, Georgia, before and after World War I. He wrote several novels and manifestoes, but is best known for the “postcard” poems he distributed at cafés and outside cinemas which proclaim his cosmopolitan and revolutionary credo and experiment with odd typefaces and experiment with incantatory nonsense words in Armenian, dipping also into the Armenian mythological past. (His Russian Futurist colleagues named this technique zaum’, i.e., transrational language.) Among his friends and associates were the poets Osip Mandelstam and Yeghishe Charents. Kostan Zarian evokes the poet and his turbulent surroundings in the novel Nave Leran Vra (The Ship upon the Mountain).

Karapet Sital, a native of Kasht, set down the epic in a unique and rare volume, recasting it as an anti-fascist allegory. The full text is presented here, with an annotated translation and philological study by Prof. James Russell of Harvard University.

Born in Zahleh, Lebanon, in 1941, Kardash Onnig escaped the Armenian fratricide of 1958, which was being waged in the streets of Beirut, by immigrating to New York. After becoming a driving force in the emerging field of multimedia in the 1960s, he left the corporate world and eventually settled down in upstate New York, where he built his home and studio.\