The Alan Cheuse International Writer’s Center is thrilled to announce Oksana Maksymchuk as our Winter Cheuse Center Scholar, supported by a Scholl Foundation grant. From December 8, 2024, to March 3, 2025, Oksana will bring her renowned talent and insight to our community, working on a project of philosophical scholarship around our 2024-25 theme, the politics of language./ the language of politics.
Oksana Maksymchuk is a celebrated poet, translator, and essayist whose works resonate deeply within and beyond literary circles. Her poetry collections, translations, and essays have received international acclaim, positioning her as a vital voice in the contemporary literary landscape. Oksana’s impactful work has resonated widely, with her latest book, Still City, captivating readers with its profound explorations of resilience and identity.
She is the author of poetry collections Xenia and Lovy in the Ukrainian. She coedited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, an anthology of contemporary poetry, and has published a few single-author volumes of translations. 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.
Her tenure as Cheuse Center Scholar will include public readings, community engagement, and scholarly contributions.
Events will be announced soon, and will be between February 20 and February 25 in Virginia and DC.
For more details about Oksana’s publications, including her most recent work, visit here.
In an interview in PNR, the interviewer Sasha Dugdale asks Oksana Maksymchuk:
Could you say a little about the language politics during the period of your childhood in Lviv? As you’ve said, Lviv was a thriving centre for Ukrainian culture and language within an enormous Soviet empire with only one state language: Russian. What did this mean for everyday living in practice?
Maksymchuk replies:
When I was growing up, everyone in my family only spoke Ukrainian, but such different dialects that to me they sounded like different languages. In Lviv, where I was born, my parents and I were outsiders – everyone was; it was practically a new city, demographically speaking, after the war. The Jewish third of the population had been exterminated under the German occupation or transferred to the camps, and the Polish half had been deported on Soviet orders. Of the original pre-war population, fewer than one-fifth remained in the city. But the surrounding villages were Ukrainian-speaking, so by the time I was born, Lviv was three-fourths Ukrainian. Nevertheless, Russian was the dominant language on TV; many of my books were in Russian. We children often tried speaking Russian to each other during playtime – all our curses and threats and spells and counting-out rhymes were in Russian, for instance. Later on, in the early nineties, when we started playing with Barbie dolls and watching foreign soap operas, almost universally dubbed in Russian, we would apply the melodramatic dialogues from the soaps to our games. It was a language of intrigue, and sex, and everything prohibited we weren’t supposed to speak about – a language that held our dirty thoughts and adolescent anxieties.
We are honored to host such a dynamic and accomplished figure, furthering our mission of fostering international dialogue through the literary arts.
Welcome, Oksana!
January 29, 2025