Ilya Kaminsky
Russian 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 sixteen, 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 is 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.
About THE ECCO ANTHOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL POETRY (2010)
In The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, introduced and edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris, poetic visions from the 20th century will be reinforced and in many ways revised. Alongside renowned masters, there will be many new discoveries—internationally celebrated poets who have rarely, if ever, been translated into English. In conjunction with the organization Words Without Borders—an online haven for international literature and an ally to writers all over the world—Ecco presents a paperback anthology that will surely serve as a canonical touchstone in the field of poetics, bringing voices from afar to American readers.
As aptly put in Words Without Borders’ mission statement, this collection also serves as part of “the ultimate aim to introduce exciting international writing to the general and literary public—travelers, teachers, students, publishers, and a new generation of eclectic readers—by presenting international literature not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world.”
About DANCING IN ODESSA (2004)
"...a remarkable debut, one that affords a rare and exhilarating pleasure: the sense of being at the start of something marvelous." —Boston Review
Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, "I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it." One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this Russian immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself, "A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish," Kaminksy dances with the strangest — and the most recognizable — of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.
