ILYA KAMINSKY, POET

“Ilya Kaminsky proceeds like a perfect gardener--he grafts the gifts of the Russian newer literary tradition on the American tree of poetry and forgetting.”
—Adam Zagajewski

“A superb and vigorous imagination, a poetic talent of rare and beautiful proportions, whose work is surely destined to be widely and enthusiastically noticed and applauded.” —Anthony Hecht

“It is the book I wish I have written. It reaches far back into collective human imagination and charges our present historical moment with a great sense of destiny” —Li-Young Lee

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, now Ukraine, in 1977, to Jewish parents who had prospered against long odds: His paternal grandfather had been killed by Stalin, his grandmother sent to Siberia, and his father stolen from an orphanage and raised by an uncle. Kaminsky lost his homeland at age 16, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when rampant crime, inflation and anti-Semitism forced the family to seek political asylum in the United States. They arrived in Rochester, New York in 1993, not speaking a word of English. Six years later, Ilya was a Georgetown University graduate and the youngest writer-in-residence ever appointed at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Dancing In Odessa was named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2005 by ForeWord Magazine. Kaminsky a recipient of the 2005 Whiting Writer's Award, given to emerging writers with one published book. In 2001 Kaminsky was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship by Poetry magazine. He has also received the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, the Milton Center's Award for Excellence in Poetry, and the Southeast Review's first annual chapbook award for Musica Humana. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Tikkun, Southeast Review, and numerous other publications.

Kaminsky also writes poetry in Russian. His work in that language was chosen for "Bunker Poetico" at Venice Bienial Festival in Italy. In late 1990s, Ilya co-founded Poets For Peace, an organization which sponsors poetry readings in the United States and abroad with a goal of supporting such relief organizations as Doctors Without Borders and Survivors International. He is also the poetry editor of Words Without Borders, an online magazine featuring international literature in translation.

In an interview with Kaminsky in the SF Reader, Walker Brents writes, “[Ilya] strikes his tuning fork against paradox and dilemma. Home itself is haunted by homesickness.`Language is our home,` he tells me. I ask him about silence.`I speak against silence, but silence is what moves me to speak. Silence is where we come from and where we go back. You see, I am deaf. We could talk about silence a long time. `” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes, “Kaminsky is an uncommonly outward-looking poet, and dislocation and loss seem to have deepened his sense of preciousness of things.”

Kaminsky gives poetry readings around the country and teaches at many literary centers. After having worked as a Law Clerk at Bay Area Legal Aid, helping impoverished and homeless in solving their legal difficulties, he now teaches writing at San Diego State University.

www.ilyakaminsky.com

www.wordswithoutborders.org