Jesse Arlen to Present “To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here?” at NAASR

BELMONT, MA — The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) host a poetry reading and presentation of Armenian-American Tenny Arlen’s posthumously published, bilingual book of poetry To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? (Կիրքով ըսելու՝ ինչո՞ւ հոս եմ), presented by her brother, Dr. Jesse Arlen.  This program is co-sponsored by NAASR and the Belmont Public Library as part of a series of collaborative events between the two institutions and will take place on Thursday, April 9 2026, at 7:30 p.m. at the NAASR Vartan Gregorian Building, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA.

The event is free and open to the public and can also be attended online via Zoom (registration link: https://bit.ly/4soKyhn) or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/ArmenianStudies).  Following the program there will be a reception and a book signing to which all attendees are cordially invited.

Tenny Arlen grew up in San Luis Obispo, CA, and graduated from UCLA in 2013. In 2015, she was admitted to the University of Michigan’s doctoral program in Comparative Literature with a plan to study French and Armenian symbolist poetry, but she passed away in a car accident in the summer of 2015 before beginning the program.

Her book of poems, published by the ARI Literature Foundation (Yerevan, 2021) with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, was republished in a bilingual edition by Tarkmaneal Pres in 2025 with the original poems alongside English translations by Tenny and her brother Jesse Arlen.

Dr. Jesse Arlen is the director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. His research focuses on medieval literature and religious culture. He is also a published writer and translator of Western Armenian poetry and critical and creative prose.

For more information about this program, contact NAASR at hq@naasr.org.