K.B. Thors grew up on Treaty 7 land just west of the Red Deer River-Waskasoo Seepee outside of Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. A Ukrainian-Icelandic settler, she has lived in Edmonton, Granada, New York, Toronto, Montréal, and Los Angeles, recently serving as the CBC/QWF 2020 Montréal Writer in Residence.
Vulgar Mechanics, a debut poetry collection, is available from Coach House Books. Poems have appeared across Canada, the U.S., U.K., and in Spanish translation.
Thors’ Icelandic-English translation of Stormwarning by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir (Phoneme) won the American Scandinavian Foundations Leif and Inger Sjöberg Award and was longlisted for the 2019 PEN America Literary Award for Poetry in Translation. The follow up translation of Tómasdóttir’s latest book Hejusögur (Herostories) will be published in 2023 by Deep Vellum.
Thors’ Spanish-English translation of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio is available from Ugly Duckling Presse.
A graduate of Columbia University's School of the Arts, Thors was awarded Columbia’s Teaching Fellowship in Poetry in 2013. A Lincoln Center Poets Out Loud finalist, Vallum Poetry Prize winner and Arc Poem of the Year finalist, she was a Translator in Residence at the Icelandic Literature Center and The Writers´ Union of Iceland in 2017.
In addition to Columbia, Thors has taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, the New York Hetrick-Martin Institute/Harvey Milk High School for LGBT Youth, the University of Toronto and the Nordic Language Initiative. A former Girls Right Now mentor, she spent two years as an Academic Director for Great Books Summer Programs at Stanford and Amherst College.
Before moving to New York, Thors worked in a sex-positive, wom@n-positive, and body-positive sex shop. That led to educational engagements on body/language in academia and the community at large, including a prairie-touring theatre production that taught middle schoolers about sexual health using the metaphor of “driver training.” Prior to this, Thors was a Creative Literacy Programmer for Edmonton's Public Library and Inner City Children's Programs, fostering creativity and confidence in at-risk youth.
Thors studied Philosophy at the University of Alberta, writing on the aesthetic experience of nature under environmental philosophy pioneer Allen Carlson. Mentored by Cressida J. Heyes, Canada's Research Chair in Gender and Sexuality, Thors participated in a ground-breaking interdisciplinary philosophy of the body course that included a yoga practice built on phenomenology. A classically trained contemporary and Ukrainian folk dancer, experiential somatics and storytelling ground Thors’ interest in expression, politics, and sweat.
A former Translation Editor for Newfound: An Inquiry of Place, Thors has served as Assistant Editor for Asymptote and Poetry Editor for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
Now in LA, she’s writing a queer historical Western series and polishing a semi-autobiographical screenplay about a queer woman working in a sex shop.
Call her she or experiment with grammar and get in touch at karabthors@gmail.com.
