Ilya Kaminsky!

We’re very excited to announce that Ilya Kaminsky will be appearing at this year’s festival. Ilya’s astonishing book, Deaf Republic, has been met with rapturous acclaim by critics and readers alike. A parable in poems bursting with exquisite language, it confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Ilya is the second of this year’s poets (along with Jericho Brown) whose latest collection was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of the widely acclaimed Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. Poems from Deaf Republic were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize. He is also the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). Kaminsky has won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award.

Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. In the late 1990s, Kaminsky co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization that sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad. He has also worked as a Law Clerk at the National Immigration Law Center and at Bay Area Legal Aid, helping the poor and homeless to overcome their legal difficulties. He teaches at the MFA program at San Diego State University. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Katie Farris.