Hannah Arendt Center presents:
Poetry and Tragedy (featuring works by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris)
A multi-media presentation for the Hannah Arendt Center's 17th annual fall conference
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Olin Humanities Auditorium
2:00 pm
This event occurs on:
Thu. October 16, 2 pm
A collaborative presentation of the works of Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris (performed by Ella Dershowitz) on deafness, the war in Ukraine, and the challenges of facing cancer, moderated by erica kaufman. Join us for performance poetry and a riveting conversation about how joy can carry us through struggle, and how art can take tragedy and turn it into something meaningful.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the US in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a 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 Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.
Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Ella Dershowitz has performed in new plays Off-Broadway (at New Group, Vineyard Theatre, 59E59, and Clubbed Thumb) and across the country (mostly in New England, New Jersey, and the Bay Area), as well as on TV and film. When not acting, she creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal.
erica kaufman is a poet, writer, and teacher, and the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. she is the director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College where she is also Writer-in-Residence.
Learn more at hac.bard.edu/joy-2025. Registration for the conference is free to the Bard community and HAC members, so join the Center! Come for a panel or stay the whole time!
A collaborative presentation of the works of Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris (performed by Ella Dershowitz) on deafness, the war in Ukraine, and the challenges of facing cancer, moderated by erica kaufman. Join us for performance poetry and a riveting conversation about how joy can carry us through struggle, and how art can take tragedy and turn it into something meaningful.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the US in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a 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 Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.
Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is boysgirls (Tupelo Press), a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey.
Ella Dershowitz has performed in new plays Off-Broadway (at New Group, Vineyard Theatre, 59E59, and Clubbed Thumb) and across the country (mostly in New England, New Jersey, and the Bay Area), as well as on TV and film. When not acting, she creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal.
erica kaufman is a poet, writer, and teacher, and the author of three books of poetry: POST CLASSIC, INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books), and censory impulse (Factory School). she is co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. recent poems can be found in Ursula and e-flux. kaufman's prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in: The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies; Reading Experimental Writing; and The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. she is the director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College where she is also Writer-in-Residence.
Learn more at hac.bard.edu/joy-2025. Registration for the conference is free to the Bard community and HAC members, so join the Center! Come for a panel or stay the whole time!