This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
Poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, two former Atlantans who are married, will give a reading of their work at The Breman Museum April 18 at 7 p.m. in a program that coincides with Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day).
Kaminsky was the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech before he joined the faculty of Princeton University earlier this year. Farris, who is fighting breast cancer, taught literature at Georgia Tech and now is a visiting associate professor at Princeton.
A native of Ukraine, Kaminsky has emerged as an important voice on the Russian invasion of his homeland. His poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” went viral after the invasion and the collection it comes from, Deaf Republic, was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in poetry.
He was named by the BBC as one of the “12 artists that changed the world” in 2019.
“History is lying there in the middle of the street, behind yellow police tape. Showing us who we are,” Kaminsky told ArtsATL in 2021. “How do I address this, as a lyric poet? Do lyric poets address such things? What is silence? We speak against silence, but it is silence that moves us to speak. I am not a documentary poet; I am a fabulist. And, yet, the world pushes through, the reality is everywhere.”
Farris has a new collection of poetry, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, and both authors will do a book signing following their reading. The event, which also be live-streamed via Zoom, is free but registration is required.
“On Yom HaShoah, as we remember and mourn the six million European Jews lost amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the Breman will also take measure of contemporary struggles, both political and personal,” Breman Executive Director Leslie Gordon said in a press release. “Poets can help us make sense and, as Ilya Kaminsky has said is his mission, to witness and share ‘lyricism in the whirl of our griefs.’”
The Breman also will help present the 58th annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration at 11 a.m. Sunday at the “Memorial to the Six Million” monument at Greenwood Cemetery. The featured speaker will be Holocaust survivor Ilse Eichner Reiner, who as a child in Czechoslovakia was sent to the ghetto and then Theresienstadt concentration camp. She was one of only 100 of 15,000 child prisoners who survived the camp.
That same day, the Breman Museum’s exhibition “Absence of Humanity: The Holocaust Years, 1933-1945″ will be open free to the public from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
POETRY READING
Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris
7 p.m. April 18. Free; register required. The Breman Museum, 1440 Spring St. NW, Atlanta. thebreman.org.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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