Book Launch: Still City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) by Oksana Maksymchuk

The poems in Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut English-language collection meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems were composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet’s homeland, others emerged in its wake. Navigating between a chronicle, a chorus, and a collage, Still City reflects the lived experiences of liminality, offering different perspectives on the war and its aftermath. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, making sense of the transformations that war affects in individuals, families, and communities. Now ecstatic, now cathartic, these poems shine a light on survival, mourning, and hope through moments of terror and awe.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection “Still City” was published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK) and was long-listed for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2025 Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review and many other journals. She co-edited an anthology, “Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine,” and co-translated several poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

Moderator: Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky (U of Kansas/Shevchenko Scientific Society)

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