Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa and came to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.
He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (2004), which won the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award, and has been translated into Chinese, French, Icelandic, Romanian, and Turkish. His Deaf Republic (2019) was a New York Times Notable Book, the winner of the Winner of LA Times Book Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and National Jewish Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Book Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, Forward Prize (UK), and the T. S. Eliot Prize (UK). Kaminsky’s honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Milton Center’s Award for Excellence in Writing, the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize as well as their Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Philips Exeter Academy’s George Bennett Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets fellowship. He coedited, with Carolyn Forche, In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine (2023) and, with Susan Harris, the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (2010), and edited and co-translated Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (2010).