20 Facts About David Kherdian

David Kherdian was born on 1931 and is an Armenian-American writer, poet, and editor.

David Kherdian illustrated many of his books, and provided nearly all of his book titles.

David Kherdian's reputation is spread over all the genres he has worked in, from his many books, to the three journals he edited, as well as his three small presses he founded.

David Kherdian was the first to place ethnic-American writers within the canon of American literature, which he accomplished through anthologies and journals, and just as importantly with his own writings.

David Kherdian dropped out of high school during the first semester of his junior year.

David Kherdian was driven to know himself, feeling an urgency to get the first twelve years of his life understood and reconciled, in order to become an adult.

David Kherdian was nineteen when he read Theodore Dreiser's The Stoic, and realized that there existed another way of being in life, which prompted him to pursue writing as a means toward an ideal goal.

David Kherdian would continue his resistance to authority, a pattern begun in elementary school, and continued as an artist contemptuous of academia, and eschewing all factions, fashions, and movements in literature.

David Kherdian grew up beside Root River, on the shores of Lake Michigan, enshrining both in his writings.

David Kherdian credited the three large Kaiserlian families as his first literary influences during his childhood years.

David Kherdian moved from the Berkshires to New York City to take the editorship of Ararat: A Quarterly, Armenian-American literary journal to which he had long contributed poems, reviews, and articles.

David Kherdian soon met his soul mate, Nonny Hogrogian, who became his art director, collaborator and lifelong mate.

David Kherdian began friendships with Philip Whalen, David Meltzer, William Everson, Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, and others, but most importantly, William Saroyan, who would soon become his mentor and good friend.

Shortly after leaving San Francisco for Fresno, David Kherdian founded The Giligia Press, where he published his second book and his first book of poems, On the Death of My Father and Other Poems, that Saroyan would title and write an Introduction for, calling the title poem one of the best lyric poems in American poetry.

Also, during this same period, David Kherdian taught a class on Beat poetry, for the first time in an American college or university.

David Kherdian began what he called Writing Classes, combining the gains made from his own writings with the principles of the Gurdjieff teaching, in a method that would liberate those who had formed patterns in their childhood that constricted their growth.

David Kherdian was now working in a variety of genres: fiction, biographies, memoirs, children's books, and translations and retellings, including the Armenian bardic epic, David of Sassoun, told in a series of genealogical tales covering five generations.

David Kherdian has been credited through his anthologies, his journal Forkroads, and through his small press with establishing ethnic American literature into the American canon.

David Kherdian was drawn to his heritage, not only to be informed of his own ancestry, but to seek influences that he needed to examine for himself, in order to evolve both as a man and as an artist.

In time David Kherdian would absorb, transform and transcend many of the inhibiting conditions of his own culture, together with the racial predispositions passed down to him, to achieve liberation from all the elements and factions that would impede his spiritual awakening and growth, while he enshrined with his art some of the many achievements of his ancestral race.