[4] The majority of his early poems were written over a period of one month, during his first visit to the Berkshires of Massachusetts in the summer of 1970.

[citation needed] Kherdian won the 1979 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for children's non-fiction, 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 sequel, Finding Home (1981), describes her moving to the United States as a mail-order bride; it is sometimes cataloged as fiction.

[7] In 2017, he published Starting from San Francisco: A Life In Writing, in which he wrote about his school years.

[8] Kherdian credited the three large Kaiserlian families (comprising ten children in all) as his first literary influences during his childhood years.