Welcome to the Big Read initiative from NEA awarded to Dr. Jill Bradbury, Chair of NTID Performing Arts. Free books are available at Ritter Library, near the entrance. They are on a shelf in front of you with a Deaf Republic poster.
"Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is the subject of the NEA Big Read project during National Deaf History Month in April 2023, hosted by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “Big Read—a partnership with Arts Midwest—broadens our understanding of our world, neighbors, and ourselves through the power of a shared reading experience."
Ilya Kaminsky will give a spoken English presentation with ASL interpretation about Deaf themes from the book on Saturday, 2023 April 1st-April 3rd. The play is from Friday, April 14th- to Sunday, April 16th, 2023. A slate of poets will be visiting in April. Keep up-to-date via this website.
"During the project, NTID will visit communities, on and off campus, through in-person and virtual events, including book giveaways, book discussions, panel discussions, poetry readings, workshops, gallery exhibits, and American Sign Language performances of poems in the Deaf Republic. In addition to book discussions at NTID and throughout the Monroe County Library System, Kaminsky will give a reading and presentation at NTID. Rochester Public Library and Monroe County Library Services are partner organizations. All events will be free except for staged readings or performances."
There is a call for art inspired by the book which will be exhibited at the Dyer Art Gallery and public libraries. Contact Dr. Pamela Kincheloe if interested. Here is the link to submit artworks. Did you know there are approximately 15,000-20,000 Ukrainian Americans in Rochester?
This InfoGuide encourages research on some themes inspired by the book and expands to other topics: language oppression, war, refugees, political activism, current events, how to determine inaccurate news, particularly from social media postings, Ukraine/Russia culture, and history, cyber war, Deaf Ukrainians and Russians and their sign languages. We included information about Ukraine because Kaminsky is Ukrainian-American. "NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.”
Dancing in Odessa : poems
Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur'genius grant'recipient Eleanor Wilner who says,'I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it.'One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this Russian immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself,'A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish,'Kaminksy dances with the strangest--and the most recognizable--of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.
Deaf Republic
Finalist for the National Book Award * Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award * Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award * Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize * Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky's astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear--they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya's girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky's long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time's vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
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