GROSSMONT COLLEGE (Press Release) — The Creative Writing Program is sponsoring a reading and book signing featuring renowned Poet Ilya Kaminsky on Thursday, October 21 at 7 p.m. in Room 220 on campus.
        
Soviet-born Kaminsky will perform poems from Forward Magazine’s 2004 Best Book of the Year, Dancing in Odessa, as well as his recent manuscript Deaf Republic.  In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship, and in 2009 selections from Deaf Republic received Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. 
         
Kaminsky’s anthology of twentieth century poetry in translation, the Ecco Anthology Of International Poetry, was published this March. About the Ecco Anthology, poet Carolyn Forche writes, “This brilliantly assembled gathering of world voices reads as a symphony of utterance beginning to end, an international conversation of the highest order, regarding the questions and concerns of humankind, beyond borders and all other such barriers, real or imagined.”

Kaminsky lost most of his hearing at age 4, when a Soviet state doctor mistook a case of the mumps for a cold. He lost his homeland at age 16, when he immigrated with his family to the United States after the U.S. government granted them asylum.

Now a resident of San Diego, Kamisnky is the editor of Poetry International and teaches Contemporary World Poetry, Creative Writing, and Literary Translation in San Diego State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Additionally, he is the co-founder of Poets for Peace, a group that sponsors poetry readings in the U.S. and abroad to support such organizations as Doctors Without Borders.

This event is free and open to the public.

*
Preceding provided by the Grossmont College Creative Writing Program