Nancy Jean Kricorian (born September 19, 1960) is an American author of the novels Zabelle (1997) and Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her third novel All the Light There Was in March 2013.

Kricorian was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Irene (Gelinas), a child care provider, and Edward L. Kricorian, a meatcutter.She is of Armenian descent on the paternal side and French-Canadian descent on the maternal side.Her grandmother's family was almost annihilated during the Armenian genocide with only her grandmother and a younger brother surviving. Kricorian stated in an interview that her non-conformity started during her childhood as she recalled: "One time I was having a fight with my father and he said, 'Now you don't talk to me like that'. And I responded 'I'm going to talk and I'm going to talk and you can't stop me'. That is a kind of resistance, they are telling me to shut up, lie down, go shopping, no, I don't want to".

In a 2013 interview, Kricorian described her youth as: "I grew up in the Armenian community. I grew up in a two-family house in Watertown, Massachusetts; on the block where I grew up half the families were Armenian. I went to the Armenian church, and a third of my classmates at school were Armenian. I really was in the community and then I desperately wanted to get out of there, I wanted to get away, so when I went to college I thought, you know, "I'm escaping," but then somehow it ended up that that is somewhere my imagination went. I ended up in this "home" place.""

Kricorian graduated from Dartmouth College in 1982 and gained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1987. She is a poet who has taught at Yale, Queens College, Rutgers, and Columbia. By her own account, she hated New York when she first arrived in 1984, and by she came to like the city in stages, settling in the city's intellectual district. The Syrian-born Canadian-Armenian writer Hrag Vartanian described her: "By her own admission Nancy Kricorian is an intellectual. A recognized poet, she is more popularly known as a novelist with two books that give voice to distinctly Armenian-American sensibilities". In her poem My Armenia she wrote: "Armenia is a country where someone is always crying, Women punch in and out on the clock, grieving in shifts, 1895, 1915, 1921, the thirties, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994..."

She is a former member of the editorial board of Ararat Quarterly the advisory board of the Armenia Tree Project, and is a NAASR member.

Kricorian is married to producer and screenwriter James Schamus. Schamus is on the board of directors of the group Jewish Voices for Peace. Schamus and Kricorian live in New York and have two daughters.