Episode 49: Ilya Kaminsky

Thursday, March 3, 2022

00:04:00

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Episode Summary

Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson reads Ilya Kaminsky's poem "We Lived Happily During the War."

Participant(s) Bio

Poet Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. He explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review, “I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.”

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion

In conversation with Robert N. Casper, Programs Director, Poetry Society of America

Co-presented with the Poetry Society of America

Thursday, November 12, 2009

01:24:16

ALOUD

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Episode Summary

Three distinctive voices in contemporary American poetry read their work and engage in an informal group discussion on their craft.

Participant(s) Bio

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction and journalism. Penguin published Ghost Girl, her most recent book of poems, in 2004, and will publish her book Dearest Creature in October, 2009. Her previous twelve books include Medicine; Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, several volumes of Best American Poetry and the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.

Poet Juan Felipe Herrera is a lover of experiment, hybrid genres and good flour tortillas. His poetry was sparked by his parent's farm-worker corridos and flourished in the civil rights movement of the 60's. In additional to his twenty-four published works Juan Felipe's recent books are Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry 2009, and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments, which won the 2008 Pen National Poetry Award and the 2008 Pen/Oakland Josephine Miles National Poetry Award. He is the TomÃ¡s Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside.

http://www.juanfelipe.org