David Kherdian
Following a typical Midwestern childhood, Kherdian moved to San Francisco, where he was befriended and influenced by writers who became the Beat poets of the 60s, before he became a poet in his own right, while starting one of the early small presses, traveling from San Francisco to New York, and selling books out of his car of his own and other poets, before he settled in New York. He had his first major breakthrough when Macmillan published The Nonny Poems. After his marriage to Nonny Hogrogian, he was appointed poet-in-the-schools in New Hampshire, and published The Road from Home, his award-winning biography of his mother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915. He and his wife would later move to Oregon to study the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff, and there they founded Two Rivers Press, learning marbling, letterpress printing, and hand bookbinding. He is currently finishing work on his retelling of David of Sassoun, the ninth-century Armenian epic poem. In the fall, Simon & Schuster will publish his children’s book, Come Back, Moon, illustrated by his two-time Caldecott Award winning wife.