Kira Josefsson

ALTA A L T A

New & emerging BIPOC lit translators! Apply for the Building Our Future 2-Day Virtual Workshop, meant to empower lit translators of color as they begin navigating the field. Led by poupeh missaghi & Sawad Hussain, w/ a business talk by Anni Liu. Free to participate! Apply by Monday:

I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—
and the short northern nights.

RIP to a true north.

I'm facilitating one of these workshops in August and there are still a few spots left! Come think about puns and the music of prose with us: www.eventbrite.com/e/2025-summe...

With the updated RCV totals just released by the Board of Elections, our campaign has officially earned the most total votes in a primary in New York City history.

Book cover for Antiquity by Hanna Johannson, trans. Kira Josefsson (Catapult), with a blonde person lightly touching the space immediately under their lower lip. Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson—a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity’s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena’s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end. https://books.catapult.co/books/antiquity/

Book cover for The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy ‬ (Feminist Press), with a bower of saplings surrounding a skull on a throne in a decorative style. In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in a powerful story of trans witchcraft. Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy. When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse. https://www.feministpress.org/books-a-m/the-sapling-cage

1/4 A short 🧵 for daily(ish) #DSPBposts #PrideMonth #books: Antiquity by Hanna Johannson, trans. @kirajosefsson.bsky.social, @catapultbooks.bsky.social books.catapult.co/books/antiqu... & The Sapling Cage by @margaret.bsky.social, @feministpress.bsky.social www.feministpress.org/news/sapling...

USA är helt beroende av papperslösa arbetare KIRA JOSEFSSON:

Skrev om Trumps räder och när lagen är både omoralisk och orealistisk: www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/a/B0P...

another solidarity drop-in coming up with the Translators Organizing Committee! Join us 🏃‍♂️

Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party The mayoral candidate is selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic Party is more complicated.

yes but for the love of g-d can people stop calling social democratic politics socialism... last time i checked zohran was not looking to abolish private property nor was bernie
nymag.com/intelligence...

So many good prizes in NWU's fundraiser raffle for Palestinian journalists: bit.ly/PJSraffle

Judith Kiros Presents Two Poems from O The work of Judith Kiros is "boundary-pushing poetry rich with references, as intellectual as it is playful."

Judith Kiros on O: "it asks itself, can poetry find a way out of tragedy?" feat. two poems from my translation of the book. Thanks @markaz-review.bsky.social ! themarkaz.org/judith-kiros...

That's so special 🌷We're currently in edits for Ia's 2018 novel Small Comfort, to be published by Wildfire Books in March!

She picked up two additional friends from our class, they were ‘brilliant super women’, ‘the world’s loveliest people’, had ‘the kindness of bodhisattvas’, until one of them reminded Niki to return the records she’d borrowed a couple of weeks earlier. The fact that she said this at a café, in front of other friends, made Niki furious; she’d been ‘dishonoured with the world as witness’ by this little rat who she never wished to see again, so when Niki got home that day she tossed the records into a plastic bag, bare vinyl and sleeves all in one jumble, took the subway to the home of their owner, and hung the bag on the door to the building; ciao.

I love a long sentence and here are two beauties, one after the other, traversing the whole duration of a friendship, clear as a brook over pebbles

From: Ia Genberg, The Details, beautifully translated by @kjokjokjo.bsky.social

Thanks so much for reading, Jo!

The young writer we fundraised for was able to leave Gaza right before it was too late. Last I heard her family was still in the hellscape created by US tax money.

A truly effective free speech org would loudly refuse the conflation of antizionism with antisemitism + put up a fight against the broad adoption of the IHRA definition,to name just one thing--we boycott because we deserve better, and because we've seen that PEN America only responds to pressure.

Second Speaker on Israel-Gaza Conflict is Canceled by Wake Forest University, an “Arbitrary and Misguided” Move - PEN America PEN America decried Wake Forest University’s cancellation of a second campus speaker connected with the Israel-Gaza conflict, just four months after the university canceled a talk by another speaker –...

Nossel may be out, but PEN America still actively defends the right of Israeli soldiers to speak on campuses (pen.org/press-releas...), and they continue to refuse the word genocide. Other PEN chapters (English PEN, PEN South Africa), have no trouble seeing the dangers of normalizing zionism.

Second Speaker on Israel-Gaza Conflict is Canceled by Wake Forest University, an “Arbitrary and Misguided” Move - PEN America PEN America decried Wake Forest University’s cancellation of a second campus speaker connected with the Israel-Gaza conflict, just four months after the university canceled a talk by another speaker –...

A lot of people have been trying to get PEN America to change for years & years, and the boycott has made it clear that pressure works where dialogue does not. Orgs like this excel in "listening and learning" without actually doing anything--unless pushed. +

Proud of everyone who boycotted ❤️‍🔥 Last year, I along with three other translators nominated for PEN awards used our withdrawal to fundraise 12k (4x the translation prize sum), which we donated to a young Gazan writer. Mass withdrawals ultimately led to Suzanne Nossel stepping down. +

On 16 May at Molasses Books (NY), I'm co-organising an event with beloved, where I'll be reading with poet-translator Miled Faiza, as well as Laura al-Tibi and Amr Amer, the duo behind "Against the Structural Weight of Catastrophe: A Poetics of Negation"

Join us at 8 pm / free

Next week––join us!

Ink is the Strongest Gunpowder - Mizna are you a total fucking idiot do you know anything about gunpowder       have you heard a hand grenade detonate have you seen a combat medic amputate eighty legs in one go do you understand what 75% s...

Translated Athena Farrokhzad's "Ink is the Strongest Gunpowder" for @miznaarabart.bsky.social : mizna.org/mizna-online...

This one is for everyone who keeps willfully confusing emotional discomfort with real harm.