Sandra & Gary Sojka Poet-in-Residence
For 40 years, the Stadler Center's Poet-in-Residence program has brought poets of national and international renown to Bucknell for an extended stay during the academic year. The Poet-in-Residence meets individually with qualified students and presents a public reading, a Q&A session, and a craft workshop. The program is meant to honor the achievement of a distinguished poet while providing undergraduate writers the opportunity to work with an exceptional talent.
Recently redesignated to honor longtime Stadler Center benefactors Sandra and Gary Sojka, the current program represents a merger of the Sojka Visiting Poet Series (1995-2020) and the original Poet-in-Residence program, which dates back to 1981. Bucknell President Gary Sojka (1985-95) was instrumental in the founding of the center and, with his wife Sandy, remains dedicated to its prosperity.
Among our recent Poets-in-Residence are Mark Doty, Terrance Hayes, Brenda Hillman, Claudia Rankine, Mary Ruefle and Ross Gay. See below for a complete list of Poets-in-Residence and Sojka Visiting Poets.
The Sojka Poet-in-Residence is selected by invitation only; the Stadler Center does not accept applications for this position.
2026–27 Sojka Poet-in-Residence
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of the widely acclaimed Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004); and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). Kaminsky has won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award. His poems and books have been published in many countries, including Turkey, Holland, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China. Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold. An alumnus of the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets and more recently, visiting faculty member in the program, Kaminsky teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
"I don't write in a language in which I have ever heard lullabies as a child. My English is the world I make as I go. It is already a private language, an imaginary language. Already a wreckage. My job is to find, among those wreckages, what is beautiful, what might have lasting value (however mistaken I might be about that value) what is worth learning by heart, repeating, becoming a spell. That is the goal."