Award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky will join the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Creative Writing faculty at Princeton University in January. Selected by the BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world,” Kaminsky has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing and will be teaching undergraduate poetry workshop courses starting with the spring semester.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.
Award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky joins Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing faculty in January 2023. Photo courtesy of Ilya Kaminsky
He is the author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa and co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva.
Deaf Republic, published in 2019 by Graywolf Press, was The New York Times’ Notable Book for 2019 and was also named Best Book of 2019 by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.
Deaf Republic, described by The New Yorker as “a contemporary epic that, like Homer’s Iliad, captures the sweep of history and the devastation of war,” opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story, told through 59 poems, follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence.
Kaminsky’s work has won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Poetry Magazine‘s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (U.K.).
His poems have been translated into over 20 languages, and his books have been published in many countries, including Turkey, Iceland, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize.
“We are immensely impressed by Ilya’s accomplishment as one of the most prominent and celebrated artist-intellectuals on the contemporary literary scene,” said Yiyun Li, director of the Program in Creative Writing. “His award-winning work is a testament to his extraordinary imagination and humanity. His breadth of knowledge, his attention to poetry in the time of crisis, his dedication to translation, his pedagogical emphasis in approaching poetry as ‘correspondences through the air,’ and his generosity of spirit will make him an invaluable addition to the creative writing community at Princeton. “
“The Lewis Center for the Arts is known as a place where writers gather and are supported, a place for collaboration and celebration of the imagination,” said Kaminsky. “I am honored and excited to join the creative writing community at Princeton, to be in conversation with students and colleagues.”
Kaminsky will join Program in Creative Writing faculty Michael Dickman, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Yiyun Li, Paul Muldoon, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Susan Wheeler, and a number of distinguished lecturers and visiting professors.
Through the program’s courses, students can pursue original work at both introductory and advanced levels in fiction, poetry, screenwriting and translation under the guidance of these practicing, award-winning writers. Students can earn a certificate in creative writing in addition to their degree in a major. Each year more than two dozen seniors work individually with a member of the faculty on a creative writing thesis, such as a novel, screenplay, or a collection of short stories, poems, or translations.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts, including the more than 100 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year, most of them free.
