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About Nancy

*Accepting editing clients to start in September 2026 Nancy Agabian is a writer, teacher, and literary organizer, working in the intersections of queer, feminist, and Armenian identity. Her 2023 autobiographical novel, The Fear of Large and Small Nations (Nauset Press), was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction, the winner of a Foreword Indies Prize, and awarded a Kirkus star. She is currently working on a personal essay collection, Mouthfuls, which uses lenses of dementia, caregiving, and grief to look at the crises of our times — pandemic, war, and genocide. Seelect essays have appeared in Epiphany, Pangyrus, Mizna, The Margins, Kweli, and elsewhere. She was awarded Lambda Literary Foundation's Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction in 2021. Nancy is also the author of Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter (aunt lute books), a memoir that was honored as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for LGBT Nonfiction and shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and Princess Freak (Beyond Baroque Books), a collection of poetry, prose, and performance art texts. Both books deal with the intimacies of Armenian American identity via stories of coming-of-age and intergenerational trauma resulting from the Armenian genocide of 1915. A longtime community-based writing workshop facilitator, she teaches creative writing at universities, art centers, and online, most recently at Bay Path University's MFA Writing Program, The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in NYC. Nancy currently serves on the board of directors of the International Armenian Literary Alliance.