Ilya Kaminsky Featured in WVIZ/PBC Special on Anisfield-Wolf Awards

Posted October 7, 2020

Ilya Kaminsky, professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was profiled as part of a television special recognizing the recipients of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The special was broadcast on PBS/ideastream on October 1 and was hosted by Henry Louis Gates.

In the special, producers paid a visit to Kaminsky's home in Atlanta, where he talked about his experience growing up deaf and the ideas behind Deaf Republic, the book of poems for which he won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for poetry.

"I was a child who saw the world through images," Kaminsky said. "You're walking down the street and you can see people's lips move, but you also see the branches move. You also see the cats watching stuff on top of a car, the birds fly down on the bench, and it's all a language. And you don't necessarily make a difference between the language of the birds flying and the language that you read on people's lips."

"What Ilya does in his book is open our eyes to the power of silence," said Rita Dove, one of the award jurists, "and also opens our eyes to ways in which we tend to think of deafness as something that is lacking, as opposed to something that can be embraced."

You can watch Kaminsky's segment at this link.