Join us Sunday, May 21st for a Spring Salon

Join us! On Sunday, May 21, 2-4pm, TOPAZ ARTS presents a Spring Salon featuring readings by Nancy Agabian celebrating her new novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations joined by fellow writers Aida Zilelian, Catherine Kapphahn, and Nita Noveno, and performance by AAPI Dance Resident Artist Nikaio Bulan Sahar.

Sunday, May 21, 2-4pm
The event is free with registration: RSVP on Eventbrite >
TOPAZ ARTS, 55-03 39th Avenue > directions

A finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, The Fear of Large and Small Nations , Nancy Agabian‘s first novel is an epic feminist misadventure story–partially set in Queens–breaks myths about gender, shame, power, and culture that travel between diaspora and homeland. Each writer will read a brief passage from Nancy’s novel alongside their own work that portrays the colorful, sometimes fraying threads that connect their characters to diverse cultures in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

Nikaio Bulan Sahar/KAōS Dance Collective will perform new work inspired by interpretations of the Philippine romance story of the androgynous moon spirit, Bulan, and the messenger of death, Sidapa. Through movement, they explore questions – how are the process of falling in love and the stages of grief interconnected? What does it feel like to crave something unattainable? How do we extend grace to ourselves and others as we cope with the death of relationships, experiences, and former iterations of the self?

Join us at TOPAZ ARTS as we celebrate Spring with new works!

About the Artists:

Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher and literary organizer who works in the intersections of queer, feminist, and Armenian identity. Her previous books include Princess Freak, a collection of poetry and performance art texts, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, a memoir honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize. In 2021 she was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation’s Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She is currently working on a personal essay collection, In-Between Mouthfuls, which frames liminal spaces of identity within causes for social justice. Nancy’s essays have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Kweli Journal, The Margins, Pangyrus, and the recent anthologies We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, and No You Tell It. A longtime teacher of creative writing with an MFA from Columbia University, she has led workshops on cultural identity at colleges and community centers, including at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and at TOPAZ ARTS.

Nikaio Bulan Sahar is a Filipinx-American dancer, composer, and teacher originally from Saranac Lake, New York. They began their training at the Lake Placid School of Dance and continued on to study at the French Academie of Ballet in NYC and is currently a company member with EMERGE125. They graduated from Oberlin College of Arts and Sciences in 2018 with a degree in dance, where they explored the bounds of how bodies are affected by a person’s history and how this can influence the quality and production of movement.

Catherine Kapphahn is a writer, educator, storyteller and speaker. Her memoir Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me received The Center for Fiction’s Christopher Doheny Award, and Catherine recorded it for Audible. Catherine has received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and City Artist Corps. Her writing has appeared in Motherwell Magazine, Croatia Week, Newtown Literary, the Feminist Press Anthology This is the Way We Say Goodbye, Astoria Life, and CURE Magazine. Catherine is an adjunct lecturer at City University of New York at Lehman College in the Bronx, where her students’ brave stories inspire her. Catherine also is a yoga teacher. She grew up near the mountains in Colorado and now lives between two bridges in Queens, New York with her husband and two sons.

Nita Noveno is a graduate of The New School MFA Creative Writing Program and the founder and host of the Sunday Salon reading series in its twenty-first year in New York City. Her work has appeared in Brink, Ghost Parachute, Hippocampus, The Hunger, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, amongst other places. The child of immigrant parents from the Philippines, Nita grew up in the temperate rainforest of Southeast Alaska and now calls Astoria, NY home. When she isn’t teaching composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, Nita is roaming the globe if not dreaming about it.

Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer, educator and storyteller from Queens, NY. Her debut novel The Legacy of Lost Things was published in 2015 and was the recipient of the 2014 Tololyan Literary Award. Aida has been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Poets & Writers, and various reading series throughout Queens and Manhattan. She is also the curator of Boundless Tales, which was one of the first reading series in Queens, NY. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Award. Aida’s most recent novel, All the Ways We Lied, is forthcoming in January 2024 (Keylight Books). She is currently working on completing her short story collection, Where There Can Be No Breath At All.

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