David Kherdian

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 won the 1979 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's nonfiction, and he was the only runner-up for the 1980 Newbery Medal, recognizing The Road from Home (1979), about the childhood of his mother Veron Dumehjian before and during the Armenian genocide. The book has been published in most European countries and in many other places, including Japan. It has been reissued several times in the United States and is increasingly read in middle schools throughout the country. In the sequel Finding Home (1981) she settles in America as a mail-order bride. It too is sometime cataloged as fiction.

Kherdian's spiritual nature, previously revealed in his closeness to nature, and his talent for drawing, did not come to fruition until he began writing poetry at age 35, when in his early book, Looking Over Hills, he broke through to another dimension of reality that would be a guide for his future work. The great majority of these poems were written in a period of one month on his first visit to the Berkshires of Massachusetts in the summer of 1970, when he "realized that the higher states in which poets often find themselves when writing do not belong to them, cannot be beckoned at will, and in fact, the poet at such times is nothing more than a radio transmitting messages between levels of reality."

In the early 1970s the Poets in the Schools project was established, with Kherdian named for New Hampshire, where the Kherdian's were living in their first home. During this period he published with Macmillan a series of three anthologies on contemporary American poetry: Visions of America: By the Poets of Our Time, and Traveling America: With Today's Poets, as well as Settling America: The Ethnic Expression of 14 Contemporary American Poets, which was the first such anthology to be published in America. During his class visits he realized that contemporary American poetry was being neglected in schools, so he followed his earlier anthologies, that were aimed at YA markets, to concentrate on the earlier grades, resulting in Poems Here and Now, The Dog Writes on the Window with His Nose, If Dragon Flies Made Honey, and his own Country Cat; City, Cat.

Upon graduating from the University of Wisconsin in January, 1960, he moved to San Francisco, a life changing experience, where he could write openly with other already established, and aspiring writers like himself. He began friendships with Philip Whalen, David Meltzer, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, and others, but most importantly, William Saroyan, who would soon become his mentor and good friend.

Following publication of his first book, A Bibliography of William Saroyan:1934-1964 he was approached by a New York editor to do bibliographies of some Beat poets. This would result in his second book, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists. The mesmerizing influence of William Saroyan was so powerful and overwhelming, that it was only after the completion of his Saroyan bibliography that he was finally liberated to write from himself.

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.

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.