Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is a Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet, critic, translator, and professor at Princeton University. He is best known for his poetry collections “Dancing in Odesa” and “Deaf Republic”, which blur the boundaries between poetry and drama. His works have been translated into over 20 languages and will be published in Polish for the first time. He has received major literary awards in the United States. Kaminsky was born in 1977 into a Jewish family in Odesa, in the former Ukrainian SSR.

He lost hearing when he was 4. When he was 16 years old, his family obtained asylum in the United States. It was there that he was fitted with a hearing aid for the first time.