Oksana Maksymchuk - "Still City" - Rachel DeWoskin

Oksana Maksymchuk will discuss Still Life. She will be joined in conversation by Rachel DeWoskin. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here (Please note your RSVP is requested but not required)

About the Book

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, the 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.

About the Author

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). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Her poems appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, 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 Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. 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. Connect with her at oksanamaksymchuk.com

About the Interlocutor

Rachel DeWoskin is the award-winning author of five novels: Someday We Will Fly (Penguin), Banshee (Dottir), Blind (Penguin), Big Girl Small (FSG), Repeat After Me (Overlook); two collections of poetry: absolute animal (UChicago Press), and Two Menus (UChicago Press); as well as the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton). She serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action (WDA). Visit her at https://racheldewoskin.com/