Oksana Maksymchuk

Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. Her English-language poems appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and some forty other journals. She co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an award-winning anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry; and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian American poet, scholar, and literary translator. In Ukraine, she is a recipient of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych and Smoloskyp prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets. Oksana’s translations appeared in such venues as Words Without Borders, Copper Nickel, and The Washington Post, while her translation of Lyuba Yakimchuk's "Prayer" was performed by the author at the 2022 Grammy Awards Ceremony. She curated editorial features for Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, The Common, and Terminus, and held readings at dozens of venues worldwide. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017), an anthology of contemporary poetry, highlighted by The New York Times, BBC Radio, CBC Radio, The Times, The Guardian, and many others. Oksana won first place in the Richmond Lattimore as well as the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She is the co-translator of The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska (HURI/Harvard UP, 2022), winner of 2023 Translation Prize from American Association for Ukrainian Studies; and of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (Lost Horse Press, 2021). Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and has published scholarly articles on Plato’s dialogues in The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, and elsewhere. In the recent years, she has been splitting her time between her hometown of Lviv, Ukraine, and other locations in Central Europe, including the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest; the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw; and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.