ILYA KAMINSKY, a Ukrainian American poet and professor, was born in 1977 in the city of Odessa, the former Soviet Union. In 1993, when he was sixteen years old, his family was granted political asylum in the United States, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s untimely death in 1994, Kaminsky began writing poems in English.
Kaminsky earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Later, he received a Juris Doctor law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law (now UC Law San Francisco).
In the late 1990s, together with Paloma Capanna, Kaminsky co-founded Poets for Peace, an organization that sponsors poetry readings in the United States and worldwide to support relief work. He has worked as a law clerk at the National Immigration Law Center and at the San Francisco Bay Area Legal Aid, helping the poor and homeless to navigate the legal process.
The award-winning poet is the author of three poetry collections and coeditor of three poetry anthologies:
- Poetry Collection Deaf Republic (2019), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf and Los Angeles Times Book Awards, and finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). It was also named Best Book of the Year by several publications.
- Anthology In the Shape of a Human Body I Am Visiting The Earth: Poems From Far And Wide (2017)
- Anthology Gossip & Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems & Prose (2014)
- Anthology The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010)
- Poetry Collection Dancing in Odessa (2004), winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, among other awards.
- Poetry Collection Musica Humana (2002)
Kaminsky’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, he also received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. In January 2023, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is a former director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation and has served as the editor of the online journal In Posse Review. He is also the Editor Emeritus of Poetry International, published by the San Diego State University (SDSU) where, for several years, he taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and directed their MFA program in poetry. After leaving SDSU, he held The Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Jr Poetry Chair of the Poetry@Tech Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, serving from 2018 to 2022.
In January 2023, he joined the faculty of the Lewis Center for the Art’s Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now lives.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Georgia Tech 2022
Visit Poet’s Official Website at www.ilyakaminsky.com
