oksana maksymchuk

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, forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). Oksana’s poems appeared in The Irish Times, The Paris Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. In the Ukrainian, she is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy and a recipient of Antonych and Smoloskyp prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets. Oksana’s translations were featured in such venues as Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, and Poetry International, while her translation of Lyuba Yakimchuk's "Prayer" was performed by the author at the 2022 Grammy Awards Ceremony. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry. Oksana won first place in the Richmond Lattimore and Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, Peterson Translated Book Award, and American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. She is the co-translator of The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska and Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 3, CBC Radio, The Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and TEDx, among other venues. 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. She currently teaches at the University of Chicago.