Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 23, 2025 to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a poetry reading and discussion with Sasha Dugdale and Oksana Maksymchuk. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
Contemporary poetry can challenge, explore uncomfortable truths, and bear witness to unimaginable experiences. In Sasha Dugdale’s new collection, “The Strongbox,” recent history and Greek mythology meet. Her varied cast of characters are abducted to foreign lands, travel through war zones, and are haunted by conflicts. Oksana Maksymchuk’s “Still City” reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Beginning as a poetic journal kept from her hometime in Ukraine, 2021-22, it chronicles events as the poet, her family and community prepare for airstrikes, as well as nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. Together, Oksana and Sasha discuss what it is to write poetry in these times of conflict.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, “The Strongbox,” was published by Carcanet in 2024 and won the Angle-Hellenic League Runciman Award. “Deformations” (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ‘Joy’ was awarded a Forward Prize in 2016. Dugdale’s translations have won PEN Awards and been shortlisted for the International Booker, the James Tait Black Prize and Warwick Prize for Women’s Writing amongst others. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory” won the MLA Lois Roth Award. Her translations of new writing for theatre have been widely produced, including stagings by the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Public Theater in New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former editor of the international magazine Modern Poetry in Translation.
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection “Still City” was published in 2024 by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). It was long-listed for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2025 Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, “Xenia” and “Lovy,” in the Ukrainian. Her poems appeared in The Guardian, 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, most recently, Alex Averbuch’s “Furious Harvests” (Harvard University Press, 2025). 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. She is currently the Fall 2025 Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College.
