Nancy Kricorian

In her poem My Armenia she wrote: "Armenia is a country where someone is always crying, Women punch in and out on the clock, grieving in shifts, 1895, 1915, 1921, the thirties, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994..."

She is a former member of the editorial board of Ararat Quarterly the advisory board of the Armenia Tree Project, and is a NAASR member.

Kricorian is married to producer and screenwriter James Schamus.

Schamus is on the board of directors of the group Jewish Voices for Peace.

Schamus and Kricorian live in New York and have two daughters.

Inspired by the French documentary Des terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists In Retirement), Kricorian began writing All the Light There Was, a novel set in Paris during what the French call les années noires ("the Dark Years", i.e the German occupation of 1940–44).

Through the film, she learned of the story of Missak Manouchian, the Armenian military commander of the FTP-MOI resistance group that consisted of immigrants to France, the largest number of which were Jews from Eastern Europe.

Kricorian also first learned of the Affiche Rouge ("Red Poster") from Des terroristes à la retraite that appeared all over France starting on February 21, 1944 bearing the photographs of Manouchian and other executed FTP-MOI members.

Kricorian was especially struck by the marginal status of the individuals featured in the Affiche Rouge, noting a number of them were stateless people who had been stripped of their citizenship for being Jewish.

In turn, she was inspired to write a novel set in the mostly Armenian immigrant working class Paris neighborhood of Belleville during the Occupation.

Kricorian believes that American society has been deadened by consumerism and materialism into apathy and indifference to social problems, saying "They want us to watch TV and shop".

She sees her novels as a way of awakening the world to pressing social and political questions.

Kricorian stated: "I write from my obsessions. Right now, I am writing about Armenians because that stimulates my imagination...Part of the reason I'm feeling politically engaged is because of the research I have been doing for my book".

Nancy Jean Kricorian (born September 19, 1960) is an American author of the novels Zabelle (1997) and Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003).

Kricorian graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982 and gained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1987.

She is a poet who has taught at Yale, Queens College, Rutgers, and Columbia.

By her own account, she hated New York when she first arrived in 1984, and by she came to like the city in stages, settling in the city's intellectual district.

The Syrian-born Canadian-Armenian writer Hrag Vartanian described her: "By her own admission Nancy Kricorian is an intellectual. A recognized poet, she is more popularly known as a novelist with two books that give voice to distinctly Armenian-American sensibilities".

Zabelle was one of several novels and memoirs by the Armenian-American writers such as Rise the Euphrates (1994) by Carol Edgarian and The Black Dog of Fate (1997) by Peter Balakian that appeared in the late 20th century dealing with the matter of the Armenian genocide, which had been a subject that had long been ignored in American literature.

In the novel, Toros Chahasbanian, the husband of the narrator confesses to her his shame at his passivity during the genocide as he states: "I watched the whole thing and did nothing. God will never forgive me".

Vartanian wrote Kricorian's novels concern female characters with "huge appetites" for wanting to explore and enjoy the world who are usually faced with some moral dilemma.

Vartanian wrote: "In her novels, moral dilemmas are carefully dissected, but they are always become fragments of larger systems, which does not make for easy morality. Kricorian's characters don't dally or naval gaze, they are sometimes curt, often direct, and always emotionally present, even when they are confronted with something as horrific as genocide...".

In Zabelle, the narrator says: "I remember what it was like to be a child-you see the world in pieces".

The line reflects Kricorian's interest how memories affect people.

Kricorian stated: "I don't think [Zabelle] sees the whole world, but as an adult you can make connections between the different scenes and impressions you can't do as a child. This perception had to do with watching one of my daughters, who seemed to have a map of the world in her head that was quite sophisticated in some small patches, but there were gaping chasms between these areas of knowledge".

The narrator says of her youth: "we didn't speak of those times, but they were like dead and rotting animals behind the walls of our house", reflecting Kricorian's belief that the genocide had done lasting harm to the Armenians.

Her first novel, Zabelle (1998), concerned the legacy of the Armenian genocide, which she took six years to write.

Her second novel, Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003) also concerned the legacy of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust as well as a half-Jewish, half-Armenian young American woman named Ani Silver confronts the suffering on both the paternal and maternal sides of her family during a lengthy trip to Paris.

Ani is a university student engaged to Asa Willard, a fellow university student from a wealthy Boston Brahmin family, and departs for Paris, only for Asa to abruptly terminate the relationship.

Feeling heartbroken, Ani chooses to stay in Paris, where she meets Van Ardavanian.

The character of Van, Ani's Armenian revolutionary boyfriend, serves as form of resistance to the way that the Turkish state denies that the Armenian Genocide ever took place, but Vartanian noted: "...it is Ani's story that is the true act of subversive resistance-the young woman carves out her own unpackaged identity".

Van turns out to be a member of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a group considered to be a terrorist organization by the governments of the United States and Turkey.

Kricorian stated: "I feel that even in the Armenian community when I was working on my second book [and wrote about the Armenian "terrorist"], they were like, 'Oh, the Turks say Armenians are terrorists, you can't write about that, you are just playing into their hands'. I think life is complicated and there are all different kinds of people doing different things and it is fascinating how people make the decisions they make, and I want to write about that".

In a review in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds wrote that in Dreams of Bread and Fire: "Kricorian does for young women what James Joyce did for middle aged men, she allows us to scramble safely amid the debris of new love, rejection, sex, and identity."

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her third novel All the Light There Was in March 2013.

Kricorian was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Irene (Gelinas), a child care provider, and Edward L. Kricorian, a meatcutter.

She is of Armenian descent on the paternal side and French-Canadian descent on the maternal side.

Her grandmother's family was almost annihilated during the Armenian genocide with only her grandmother and a younger brother surviving.

Kricorian stated in an interview that her non-confomity started during her childhood as she recalled: "One time I was having a fight with my father and he said, 'Now you don't talk to me like that'. And I responded 'I'm going to talk and I'm going to talk and you can't stop me'. That is a kind of resistance, they are telling me to shut up, lie down, go shopping, no, I don't want to".

In a 2013 interview, Kricorian described her youth as: "I grew up in the Armenian community. I grew up in a two-family house in Watertown, Massachusetts; on the block where I grew up half the families were Armenian. I went to the Armenian church, and a third of my classmates at school were Armenian. I really was in the community and then I desperately wanted to get out of there, I wanted to get away, so when I went to college I thought, you know, "I'm escaping," but then somehow it ended up that that is somewhere my imagination went. I ended up in this "home" place.""