The NTID Performing Arts program selected Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky for a performance at the RIT Inn. Kaminsky, a hard-of-hearing Ukrainian-born poet who immigrated to the United States, grew up in Rochester, New York. This production was part of the 2023 Big Read initiative, organized by NTID in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Set amid political unrest in an occupied territory, Deaf Republic unfolds through a series of lyrical, episodic poems that begin with the tragic shooting of a young deaf boy during a protest. In the wake of his death, the townspeople collectively adopt deafness as a form of resistance. The story powerfully examines how language becomes both a weapon and a refuge—illuminating the courage, defiance, and emotional scars left by violence.
The production received honors from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region 2, earning awards for Outstanding Ensemble Work and Outstanding Translation.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, in the former Soviet Union. At the age of four, he lost most of his hearing after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a common cold. In 1993, his family was granted political asylum in the United States, settling in Rochester, New York. Following his father’s death the next year, Kaminsky began writing poetry in English—a language he described as “a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom,” in an interview with the Adirondack Review.
Kaminsky earned a B.A. in Political Science from Georgetown University and a J.D. from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. He later co-founded Poets for Peace with Paloma Capanna, an organization that promotes poetry readings worldwide to support humanitarian causes. His legal background includes work with the National Immigration Law Center and Bay Area Legal Aid.
Known for his ecstatic yet precise language, Kaminsky’s poetry captures the full range of human emotion—love, grief, joy, and resilience. As E.M. Kaufman wrote in Library Journal, “His poems move through the lives of others, known and unknown, connecting the sweet and bitter stories of lost worlds.”
Kaminsky’s acclaimed works include Dancing in Odessa (2004), winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year. His later works include Traveling Musicians (2007), a collection of his Russian-language poems, and Deaf Republic (2019), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His many honors include the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Milton Center’s Award for Excellence in Writing, the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship.
Kaminsky also coedited The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010) with Susan Harris, and co-translated Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (2010). He currently resides in San Diego, California.
New York Times Notable Book
Named by BBC “one of 12 artists that changed the world”
Winner of LA Times Book Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, National Jewish Book Award.
Finalist for National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Book Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, Forward Prize (UK), T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).
Named Best Book of the Year by NPR, Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, The Guardian, Irish Times, Library Journal, The Telegraph, New Statesman, Slate, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Huffington Post, The New York Public Library, The American Library Association.
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