Atlanta Journal-Constitution Shines Spotlight on Local National Book Award Finalists

Bo Emerson of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution spends a moment with two poets who are finalists for the National Book Award in Poetry and also are Atlanta-based: Ilya Kaminsky and Jericho Brown. "Georgia Tech faculty member Ilya Kaminsky was nominated for his 'Deaf Republic,' a book-length novel in verse," writes Emerson, "and Jericho Brown, director of creative writing at Emory University, was acknowledged for his collection 'The Tradition.'" Picking up there: 

According to Georgia Tech, this is the first time that a book by a non-U.S. born refugee is a finalist for the award. 

Brown previously won the American Book Award in 2009 for his first poetry collection, “Please.” 

A native of Ukraine, Kaminsky was a teenager when he escaped to the U.S. with his family in 1993, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of violent anti-Semitism. 

Neither Kaminsky nor his family could speak English, but he learned to write in the new language and continued a practice he had begun back in Ukraine, writing poems on any available scrap of paper. 

His ability to pick up the new language was remarkable, considering that he had lost most of his hearing at age 4, due to a misdiagnosed case of the mumps. 

Kaminsky joined the Tech faculty only a year ago but has already won a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Poets Fellowship. 

“For Ilya to come here and do all of this in the first year is pretty amazing,” said Richard Utz, chair of the school of literature, media and communication at Georgia Tech. “We have a poet who is at as high a level as our colleagues in engineering.” 

Louisiana native Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Brown came to Emory in 2012. Speaking Wednesday as he was boarding an airplane in his native Shreveport, where he received the Corrington Award, he said he felt “ecstatic,” when he learned he was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

“I haven’t really processed it,” he said, “but I had this moment of vindication and accomplishment: that I was right. I felt justified. In this world when you’re any kind of a writer, and most definitely when you’re a poet, there’s a way in which you’re defending yourself and justifying yourself to the rest of the world.” 

Continue reading at Atlanta Journal-Constitution.