KB Thors is an Icelandic-Ukrainian writer from Treaty 7 land west of Red Deer, Alberta—Canada’s oil country. Her work (pronouns she/any) explores romp, circumstance, and diverse modes of brazen living.

KB’s debut poetry collection Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House Books 2019) is “defiantly playful” (Montreal Review of Books). “Part feminist manifesto, part poetic memoir,” Thors “achieves a stunning balance between humor and heartbreak” (Barrelhouse). Linking sexual violence with invasive oil industries and straightforward identity categories with exploitative resource economies, Vulgar is ultimately “a fierce argument for multiplicity and inclusion” (Harvard Review).

A translator from Icelandic and Spanish, KB’s latest book of translation is Herostories (Deep Vellum 2023), Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s collection of found poems composed of biographies and memoirs of 19th & 20th century Icelandic midwives. Thors’ previous Tómasdóttir translation, Stormwarning (Phoneme 2018), won the American Scandinavian Foundation‘s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Award and was nominated for the 2019 PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation.

Thors’ culture writing, interviews, and literary/film criticism has appeared in venues like The Harvard Review, Guernica, BOMB, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Lambda Literary.

After completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, KB was granted Columbia’s 2013 Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship in Poetry. She has since taught creative writing and literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT SUNY), the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, Toronto’s Nordic Language Initiative, and Great Books Summer Programs.

The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Catwalk Art Institute, Icelandic Literature Center, Canada Arts Council, Alberta Arts Foundation, and CBC/QWF Montreal, KB splits time between the prairies, the road, and NYC. @kbthors