A Reading and Conversation with Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, and Nikola Madzirov

Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, and Nikola Madzirov: A Reading and Conversation

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at St. Cloud State University and the Literary Arts Institute of the College of Saint Benedict in partnership with Verse Like Water poetry series at Central Lakes Community College. 

 

This event is free, open to the public and accessible. 

 

Bios:

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.

He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins), In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine (Arrowsmith), and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books).

His work was the finalist for The National Book Award and won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship,  The Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).

Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book, and was also named Best Book of the Year by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.

He collaborates frequently with painters, sculptors, musicians, choreographers, and theater artists. Odesa, Kaminsky’s recent collaboration with the photographer Yelena Yamchuk, published by Gost Books, was listed by Time Magazine among The 20 Best Photo Books of 2022.

His poems have been translated into over twenty languages, and his books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Latvia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, Iceland, India, Slovenia, France (where Kaminsky received Prix Alain Bosquet given annually by Gallimard), Italy (where his work was honored by the Bonanni Prize in L’Aquila), Germany (where his poetry was listed by the SWR television channel as German literary critics’ top pick) and China (where he was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize). In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”

Ilya Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. More recently, he worked pro-bono as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California.

 He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

 

Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020). Her work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation fellowship, the Amy Clampitt fellowship, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the Best Single Poem, and has appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Granta, and many more. Mort translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and the National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation for her work on Polina Barskova’s book of selected poems, Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021). With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. Valzhyna Mort’s poetry collections have come out in translation in Germany, Sweden and Ukraine, while single poems have been translated into a dozen of languages. Outside the US, she has received the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors (Germany) and the Crystal of Vilenica prize (Slovenia). 

 

Macedonian poet, editor, and translator Nikola Madzirov was born in Strumica to a family of Balkan War refugees. Madzirov’s poetry examines both personal and cultural geography in order to trace the nature of our movement across those landscapes. In a review of Remnants of Another Age in the Tottenville Review, Mike Walker notes, “[O]ften in Madzirov’s poetry, there is a sense of escape but also a sense of the imperative for such escape. The characters who people his poems are half the time in transit, in flight, and half the time already gone. There is a sense of autumnal winsomeness yet also a feeling of suspense in his work.” In a 2011 interview with L.A. Grove for the California Journal of Poetics, Madzirov addressed the nature of translation, stating, “There are many poems in which we can recognize ourselves without having written them, just as there are cities where we have imagined ourselves much earlier before we travel there. The translator is a silent deconstructor, a night guard of the bridges of difference and understanding.”
 
He is the author of several collections of poetry including Studentski Zbor award-winner Locked in the City (1999), Aco Karamanov Award-winner Somewhere Nowhere (1999), and Huberta Burda Award-winner Relocated Stone (2007). Poet Carolyn Forché wrote the foreword to a volume of his selected poems, Remnants of Another Age(2011, translated by Peggy Reid, Graham Reid, Magdalena Horvat, and Adam Reed). Madzirov’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
 
His additional honors include the Hubert Burda European Poetry Award, the Miladinov Brothers poetry prize and residencies at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, LiteraturRaum in Berlin, KulturKontakt in Vienna, Literatur Haus NÖ in Krems, and Villa Waldberta in Munich. He has served as Macedonian coordinator for the international poetry network for Lyrikline and as poetry editor for the Macedonian online journal Blesok.
  
Madzirov lives in Macedonia.