Russian émigré poet to read April 12 on campus

An award-winning poet who immigrated to America from the Ukraine at the age of 16 will celebrate National Poetry Month at SUNY Fredonia with a reading and book-signing Wednesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. in Jewett Hall Room 101. The event is free and open to all.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa, picked as the Best Poetry Book of the Year in 2005 by ForeWord magazine. His first book-length collection of poems, his work has won numerous prizes and attracted attention to its author’s unique history. In 2005, Mr. Kaminsky won the Whiting Prize, the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Judge’s Prize from Tupelo Press.

Deaf since the age of four, he came to the U.S. in 1994 as a teenager with his family, not knowing a word of English. Rampant crime, inflation and anti-Semitism had forced his parents to request political asylum, and upon receiving it, they settled in Rochester, NY.

Six years later, Mr. Kaminsky was a Georgetown University graduate and the youngest writer-in-residence ever appointed at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Eric McHenry noted that Mr. Kaminsky writes “stunning, moving, award-winning poetry -- not only in a second language, but in a language he has never heard clearly.” (Read the full article)

Now a resident of Berkeley, CA, Mr. Kaminsky will begin teaching in the graduate writing program at San Diego State University this fall. He is one of the founders of 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.

The Fredonia reading is sponsored by the Mary Louise White Fund of the Fredonia College Foundation and the Department of English.