Housing Works Bookstore Cafe | Wednesday, September 25 @ 7PM

Join us for a reading in celebration of Ilya Kaminsky’s new collection of poetry, Deaf Republic & Nomi Stone’s new collection, Kill Class. Reception and book signing to follow.

Sponsored by Adelphi University MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signs by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. 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.

In Kill Class, a poet and anthropologist explores the surprising world of war games in mock Middle Eastern villages in which the U.S. military trains. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine—alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart.

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Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Dancing in Odessa, and coeditor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Visit his site. Follow him on Twitter.

Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo 2019). Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Tin House, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her anthropological articles appear in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist, and her ethnographic monographic, Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire, is currently a finalist for the University of California Press Atelier series for Ethnographic Inquiry in the 21st Century. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Stone has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford, an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and teaches at Princeton University. Visit her site. Follow her on Twitter.

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Housing Works engages in an array of advocacy strategies to further our mission of ending the twin crises of AIDS and homelessness. Over the past three decades, we’ve learned that any effective plan to address AIDS requires shared commitment: the political will of governments, coordination between health agencies at all levels, and the energy and dedication of AIDS activists, doctors, researchers, service providers, and communities affected by HIV/AIDS.The Housing Works AIDS-FREE Campaign is a collaborative, multi-year initiative committed to ending the AIDS epidemic—in New York State by 2020, in the United States by 2025, and worldwide by 2030.