Georgia Tech Professor Wins Los Angeles Times Book Award

Posted April 17, 2020

By Michael Pearson

Ilya Kaminsky, professor of poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was named winner Friday, April 17, of the Los Angeles Times 2019 Book Prize in Poetry for Deaf Republic.

“This hybrid work is a testament to the human spirit,” the judges said in their award citation. “The book’s political esprit de corps, its savvy innovation, and visual beauty (rooted in defiant puppetry and hallowing sign language) make Deaf Republic feel like a contemporary classic."

In an acceptance video posted by Los Angeles Times on Twitter, Kaminsky said he was “humbled and beyond grateful that the world recognizes a book written by someone who came to America at 16 without speaking a single word of English.”

“It is written in memory of my parents, who were refugees and gave up everything for me,” he said.

“This award also recognizes, in the middle of global pandemic, somebody who lives with disability, and I hope Deaf Republic — in a small way — shows that disability can be not just a medical condition, but a political position of advocacy for all of us.”

Deaf Republic is inspired by Kaminsky’s experience navigating his youth in the Soviet Union as a person living with hearing impairment as well as by life in the United States. The book follows the lives of ordinary citizens living in an occupied country who go deaf the moment a boy with a hearing impairment is shot and killed by soldiers. It is at once a fairy tale, an exploration of language in a time of crisis, and an intensely political text that questions indifference to oppression and violence.

Kaminsky is the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Jr. Chair in Poetry in the School of Literature, Media and Communication and is director of the Poetry@Tech program, which engages Georgia Tech students and the public, and presents the South’s premier poetry reading series. He joined Georgia Tech in 2018, 25 years after coming to the United States with his family as political aslyees from Russia.

Previously, Deaf Republic won the National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.