Many congratulations to Oksana Maksymchuk, who has been longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection with the American edition of Still City: Diary of an Invasion!

The PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, established by a bequest from Hunce Voelcker, is given annually to a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry, published in the applicable calendar year, represents a notable and accomplished literary presence. The work will have expanded the scope of American poetry.

The annual award recognizes the importance of the poetry collection as an art form, with no restrictions on the career status of the poet. The award is for a permanent U.S. resident or citizen, of any age and writing in any poetic style, and carries a cash prize of $5,000.

Finalists for the award will be announced before the ceremony on May 8, 2025. The full longlist can be found on the prize website.


Well done to Oksana, and all the other longlisted writers and publishers!

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably, there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet's imagination must make sense of the change.

Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience. The book began 'as a poetic journal I started keeping in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of time, fate, and personhood.'