The Writing of Naira Kuzmich

Selected Publications

• A Retrospective: “Naira, Fiercely: Remembering the Life and Work of Naira Kuzmich” in Shenandoah

Nonfiction

• “Hava Nagila” in Michigan Quarterly Review

• “Garni-Geghard” in Ecotone

• “The Bargain-Shopper” in The Adroit Journal

• "Round Trip” in The Rumpus

• “Dances for Armenian Women” in Cincinnati Review

• “In a Name” in Guernica

• “On Grief” in Massachusetts Review (print only)

• “On Borders” in The Hopkins Review (print only)

• “My Evil Grandmother Wakes” in Shenandoah

• “My Sister Paints” in Southern Review (print only)

• “My Dead Aunt Watches” in Black Warrior Review (print only)

• “On Fear and Writing” in Threepenny Review (print only)

Fiction

• “The Kingsley Drive Chorus” in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, originally in Salamander (print only)

• “Eulogy for Rosa Garsevanian” in Blackbird

• “Beginning Armenian” in Arts & Letters (print only)

• “Woman Amid Ruins” in Ninth Letter (print only)

• “Cadenza” in Carve Magazine

• "Exercise in Translation” in SmokeLong Quarterly

Books

*Fearcatcher: A Novel, Forthcoming Fall 2025 with University of New Orleans Press*

Praise for In Everything I See Your Hand

Short Story Collection, University of New Orleans Press, 2022

Available to order here.

“The grace of Naira’s writing, the scale of her artistic vision, and the precision of her exquisite language illuminate her themes of cultural identity, displacement, and the experience of the Armenian Diaspora. […] She is invested in the inherent musicality of language itself, especially as it may offer a lyrical voice to a silence people. Simply, an extraordinary writer.”

-Tara Ison

“Her work cries out not just for Armenians, but for all tribes, all refugees, separated from homelands. ‘Imagine here,’ she wrote, ‘the wail of the duduk.’ Her gift of language has captured that sound on the page.”

-Stuart Dybek