Login here (no pre-registration needed): https://tinyurl.com/ZellWriters24

Seats are limited and are offered on a first come, first served basis; please arrive early to secure a spot.

Zell Visiting Writers Series craft lectures are free and open to the public, and will be offered both virtually (via Zoom) and in person (in The Robert Hayden Conference Room, Angell Hall #3222). Please contact kimjulie@umich.edu with any questions or accommodation needs.

Of his lecture, Ilya says, "How do poets learn in solitude? How do they negotiate their relationships/non-relationships to larger traditions of writers who came before them? How do poets influence each other? What is this conversation across time and space that happens between poets? What is our place in this conversation? What, indeed, is that strange thing: an education of a poet? There is no singing school but studying monuments of its own magnificence, wrote Yeats. So, in our time together we will look at some very practical devices, overhear some echoes, and consider how to discover your own singing school—your own literary tradition—and how to enter and change that tradition. Expect to leave the room with many ideas about how poets learn from other poets and how it can help your own work develop and change into the future."

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the U.S. 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.

For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email kimjulie@umich.edu--we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services at in-person events are available upon request; please email kimjulie@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event, whenever possible, to allow time to arrange services.

U-M employees with a U-M parking permit may use the Church Street Parking Structure (525 Church St., Ann Arbor) or the Thompson Parking Structure (500 Thompson St., Ann Arbor). There is limited metered street parking on State Street and South University Avenue. The Forest Avenue Public Parking Structure (650 South Forest Ave., Ann Arbor) is five blocks away, and the parking rate is $1.20 per hour. All of these options include parking spots for individuals with disabilities.