Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has named award-winning poet Ilya Kaminsky as the new director of the University’s Program in Creative Writing. Kaminsky, a Professor of Creative Writing on the Princeton faculty since 2023, succeeds Yiyun Li, who has led the program since 2022.
“I look forward to working with Ilya as the incoming director of the Program in Creative Writing, and I am deeply grateful to Yiyun Li, who has led the program with exemplary dedication, integrity, and vision,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “Ilya is a poet of international renown and engagement, as well as generosity of spirit. I have no doubt that he will bring his warm collegiality, his deliberativeness, and his piercing imagination to the role.”
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine, in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.
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 In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine.
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 the Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman. The book has been adapted for stage in many theaters around the world, most recently in Royal Court Theater in London and Maribor Puppet Theater in Slovenia.
Writer Ilya Kaminsky. Photo credit: Courtesy of Ilya Kaminsky
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, U.S.A. Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Poetry Magazine‘s Levinson Prize. His work has been shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom.
In 2023 Kaminsky was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His books have been translated into over 30 languages and published in many countries including Brazil, Turkey, Iceland, the Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, and Spain. His poetry has earned several international awards including the Prix Alain Bosquet in France, the Premio Laudomia Bonanni in Italy, and China’s Yinchuan International Poetry Prize.
In Ukraine, Kaminsky earned The Boris Dereviyanko “Ludi Dela” Civic Service award for his work in support of the humanities during the war in the city of Odesa. In 2023, the BBC aired To Odesa, his series of new essays about returning to Ukraine during the war. Kaminsky was selected by the BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”
“Our Creative Writing Program at Princeton is known for nurturing a diverse and incredibly talented community of writers, many of whom have gone on to create amazing works of literature, becoming American classics,” said Kaminsky. “It is an inspiring and energizing collective, and I am deeply honored to have this chance to support and celebrate the literary arts here at Princeton as its next Creative Writing Program director.”
While Kaminsky’s tenure as director officially began on July 1, he will take up his duties on January 1 following a semester-long sabbatical. Writer A.M. Homes will serve as acting director for the fall semester.
Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing began in 1939, when Dean Christian Gauss approached the Carnegie Foundation to help the University focus on the cultivation of writers and other artists. He appointed poet and critic Allen Tate as the first Resident Fellow in Creative Writing. Since then, world-renowned writers have served as faculty and visiting guest writers including Simon Armitage, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bowen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Robert Fitzgerald, Thomson Gunn, Edmund Keeley, David E. Kelley, Chang-rae Lee, John McPhee, Lorrie Moore, Paul Muldoon, Neel Mukherjee, Philip Roth, Claudia Rankine, Erika Sanchez, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund White, Kevin Young, Tracy K. Smith, and Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Currently the faculty, in addition to Kaminsky and Li, includes award-winning writers Katie Farris, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Jamil Kochai, Joyce Carol Oates, Patricia Smith, Lloyd Suh, and Kirstin Valdez Quade, and a number of distinguished lecturers and visiting professors.
It is with these internationally known writers that over 300 Princeton undergraduates take courses in poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and literary translation each semester, a number that continues to grow. Small workshop courses, averaging ten to twelve students, provide intensive feedback and instruction for both beginning and advanced writers. Through the program, students can earn a minor in creative writing in addition to their degree in a major. Each year, these 20 to 30 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.
Some of these senior thesis projects become the first published work by graduates of the program, as was the case for writers Jonathan Ames ’87 and Jonathan Safran Foer ’99. Other graduates from the program include Catherine Barnett ’82, Jane Hirshfield ’73, Boris Fishman ’01, Kristiana Kahakauwila ’03, Galway Kinnell ’48, Walter Kirn ’83, William Meredith ’40, W. S. Merwin ’48, Emily Moore ’99, Jodi Picoult ’87, Julie Sarkissian ’05, Akhil Sharma ’92, Whitney Terrell ’91, and Monica Youn ’93.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
