Gannon University Hosts 46th Annual Writing Awards Night; Honors Students and Poets Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris

Gannon University’s 46th annual Gannon Writing Awards Program will be held at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 20, 2023 in Yehl Ballroom at Gannon’s Waldron Campus Center, 124 W. Seventh St. and is free and open to the public.

Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris will be the distinguished guest poets and will be reading featured selections from their award-winning poetry.

Students from all three of the University’s colleges will be honored for their achievements in writing poetry, journalism, and research. In addition, winners of Gannon’s annual nation-wide high school poetry contest will be recognized.

In addition to the awards program, there will be an afternoon Writing Fair with crafts, flash fiction, a poetry workshop, photography and more fun with writing from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Third Floor Atrium, Palumbo Academic Center.

Author of Deaf Republic, Kamisky won several awards including The Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The National Jewish Book Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship. She was shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). She was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”

Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms and a translator. Her work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in magazines including American Poetry Review, Granta, and McSweeneys. She is an award-winning translator of several books of poetry from French, Ukrainian, Chinese and Russian.