Alumna K.B. Thors '04 Longlisted for 2018 PEN Award, Alumna Katrine Øgaard Jensen '17 Among Judges

PEN has announced its longlist for the 2019 PEN America Literary Awards. This year alumna and adjunct assistant professor Katrine Øgaard Jensen '17 was announced as a judge for poetry, and alumna K.B. Thors '14 was longlisted in poetry for her translation of Stormwarning by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a writer and translator. She is an incoming adjunct assistant professor this spring in the Creative Writing Program MFA program at Columbia University. Jensen is a two-time Thanks To Scandinavia scholar, and former editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her work has been published in the Columbia Journal, Washington Square Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, where she edits EuropeNow. She was recently named the winner of the 2018 National Translation Award in Poetry by the American Literary Translators Association for her translation of Third-Millennium Heart from the Danish by poet, Ursula Andkjær Olsen.

K.B. Thors grew up west of Penhold, Alberta, Canada. A Ukrainian-Icelandic Canadian, she has since lived in Edmonton, Spain, New York, and Toronto. Her translation of Stormwarning won the American Scandinavian Foundations Leif and Inger Sjöberg Award. She was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in Poetry in 2013 during her time at Columbia. 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. Her translation of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Coach House Books in 2019. Poems have appeared across Canada, the U.S., U.K., and in Spanish translation.

The finalists for all awards will be announced later this month, with an awards ceremony late February.