David Kherdian (born 1931) is an Armenian-American writer, poet, and editor. He is known best for The Road from Home (Greenwillow Books, 1979), based on his mother's childhood—cataloged as biography by some libraries, as fiction by others.
Biography
David Kherdian (ker.de.en) born December 17, 1931 in Racine, Wisconsin to Veron Duhmejian (1908 - 1981), and Melkon Kherdian (1891 – 1958). His sister, Virginia (1943 - ). Both parents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
An Armenian-American poet, novelist, and biographer, founder of three small presses and editor of three journals: Ararat: A Quarterly, Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature, and Stopinder: A Gurdjieff Journal for Our Time. His wife, Nonny Hogrogian, a painter and award-winning children's book illustrator, was the art director for each of the presses and journals. She also illustrated many of his books, and provided nearly all of his book titles. He liked to refer to her as his Senior Editor, while evoking the Armenian word, Garavel, that doesn't exist in the English language: the one who civilizes, which provision too often falls on mothers and wives—wives in particular. For two years they lived in Lyme Center, New Hampshire, where he was the state "poet-in-the-schools". The state university library is one repository for their works (in a joint collection). Hogrogian has illustrated some of his books, both poetry anthologies edited by Kherdian and his own writings.
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. He 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. As an editor, writer, and publisher, Kherdian has always been ahead of his time; he comes down the long intermittent line of mystic American poets, namely, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson—poets who are rarely valued in their lifetimes.
Permanent collections of Kherdian's work can be found in five places, University of Connecticut Special Collections, Heritage Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, University of New Hampshire Library, University of Wisconsin - Parkside, James L. Henry Collection - Bancroft Library, Berkeley California.
Early years
Kherdian's Midwestern childhood typically revolved around athletics, at which he excelled: basketball, football, and baseball, but his real athletic passion came later, when he took up golf, and quickly became a low handicapper.
His troubled school years were marked by racist teachers who held him back. He would transform their effects on him through his poems, memoirs and prose fiction. In 2017 he published Starting From San Francisco: A Life In Writing, where he wrote about his school years without rancor, although he had earlier termed his grade school years an incarcerated hell. He dropped out of high school during the first semester of his junior year. After his Army service he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a B.S. Degree in philosophy.
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. "All of these notions, I knew, had kept me from writing, but little by little, principally through a gradual understanding of Saroyan's work, I saw that for the purposes of art one life is as good as another, and that no life is unworthy of the attention of art."
From his earliest years he was a library habitue. One classmate recalled that he had set a record for book reports in the 7th grade. It was then he discovered the writings of James Willard Schultz, the squaw man who was the first white man to penetrate the Blackfeet Nation, later to become a famous children's book author with tales from his years with the Blackfeet tribe. Earlier, Kherdian's mother, who taught Armenian language classes in the church basement, brought home a drawing by one of her students of a Native American, that her son adored, inspiring his own artistic skills.
Drawing and reading were the two activities that dominated his adolescence, precluding his life as a writer, which he would prize additionally for the solitude it provided, being a loner both by temperament and defense against discrimination.