Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris
Sunday, October 22nd | 5:00 pm
Join acclaimed poets Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky for a reading on their latest collections, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive and Deaf Republic.
Farris’ “memoir-in-poems,” Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, reckons with erotic love even as the narrator is diagnosed and treated for breast cancer at the age of thirty-six. With humor and honesty, Farris portrays both the pleasures and the horrors of the lover, the citizen, and the medical subject. How can we find, in the midst of hell, what isn’t hell? And whom can we tell how much we want to live? An intimate, hilarious and devastating look into some of the most private moments of a life—even if they happen to occur in a medical office with six strangers looking on.
Kaminsky’s astonishing “parable-in-poems,” Deaf Republic, asks us, What is silence? Opening in an occupied country in a time of political unrest, the work centers upon a town who lose their own hearing upon hearing the gunshot used to kill a deaf boy, Petya. Their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea—Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.
Featured Books: Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Event Details:
This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required, but we’d appreciate an RSVP over on Facebook!
All book festival events, unless otherwise noted, will take place at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore’s main stage.
Seating is general admission; first come, first served.
A public book signing will immediately follow the discussion. Purchasing an author’s new or previously published book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line. (Additional copies of a book, purchased elsewhere, may also be signed if time permits).
About the Speakers
Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, which was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. Most recently she is winner of the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
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. 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, and the the Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. His poems have been translated into over twenty languages. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.” He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.