Author Talk: Oksana Maksymchuk

Oksana Maksymchuk will give a talk on her book of selected poems about the invasion of Ukraine, "Still City." Books will be available for sale and signing after the discussion.

The poems in Still City meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event. While some of the poems have been composed in the months preceding the full-scale invasion of the poet’s homeland, others have emerged in its wake. The collection engages a wide range of sources, including social media posts, news reports, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communications, official documents, and songs, making sense of the transformations that war affects in individuals, families, and communities.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). Oksana’s poems appeared in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, PN Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas.  

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