Splendor: Trans Poets: 14 (Calico)

Introducing readers to five trans and nonbinary poets Splendor is an ode to queer bodies, with previously unpublished translations from Argentina, Denmark, Korea, Norway, and Quebec.

From the irreverent and irresponsible to the quiet and meditative these poems decentralize our ideas of trans experience and poetics.

Splendor presents a sliver of the wide possibilities of what trans literature can offer. This is trans literature that transcends borders and binaries in order to engaging with a messy world. As Camila Sosa Villada writes, “Let us keep loving one another in this swamp of contradictions.”

Contributors:

• Introduction by Rickey Laurentiis
• Camila Sosa Villada, translated from Spanish by Kit Maude
• Luka Holmegaard, translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
• Kim Sono, translated from Korean by Eunice Lee
• Ida Hove Solberg, translated from Norwegian by Olivia Lasky
• Pascale Bérubé, translated from French by Andrew Wilson and Jana Vourgourakis

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to care. Her debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and the Whiting Award. Her much anticipated second collection, Death of the First Idea, was published in 2025 by Knopf and longlisted for the National Book Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a nominee for a NAACP Image Award.

Jennifer Russell is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Sophia Hersi Smith, they have translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Olga Ravn, and Solvej Balle.

Ida Hove Solberg is a Norwegian nonbinary poet, editor, translator, and critic with a PhD in translation studies from the University of Oslo. In 2024, they published their narrative poetry book The Last Hare, which was nominated for the Prisma Award in the category Nordic Work of the Year. In 2016, they co-founded Mellom, Norway’s first literary magazine for translated literature. As a translator, they have worked with the poetry of Athena Farrokhzad and Rasha Abdulhadi, and together with Sofia Knudsen Estifanos, they translated Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin into Norwegian.

Camila Sosa Villada was born in 1982 in La Falda (Córdoba, Argentina). She is a writer, actress, and singer. She holds degrees in communication and theater from the National University of Córdoba. Her play Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de una travesti was selected for the 2010 National Theater Festival held in La Plata. Her first novel, Bad Girls, won the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Jana Vourgourakis has been a museum educator at BAMPFA and has studied art at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and literature at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently co-translating Olivier Bruneau’s sci-fi novel Esther with Andrew Wilson. She enjoys exploring narrative and probability by collaborating on James Bond fanfiction with AI. In her spare time, she likes to eat cake.

Andrew Wilson is a graduate of the Master of Philosophy Program in Literary Translation at Trinity College, Dublin. He is currently affiliated with the Center for Literary Translation at Trinity College, Dublin, as a creative practitioner. His published translations include works by Sébastien Brebel, Bruce Bégout, Antoine Volodine, and Pacôme Thiellement. He is currently working (with Jana Vourgourakis) on a translation of Olivier Bruneau’s sci-fi novel Esther.

Pascale Bérubé is perhaps an anomaly: a trans poet who is seemingly uninterested in stable gender assignments. She is more interested in transness itself, that is, what lies between and never quite resolves itself into an identity, a floating inside an indeterminate Being. To quote the final words of the first poem in her collection, Trop de Pascale: “je ne suis pas moi” (I am not me). Perhaps this could be described as a more generalized dysphoria, but, in the hands of Bérubé, it is above all a poetics, a reappropriation of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.”

Luka Holmegaard (he/they; b. 1990) is an award-winning Danish author of fiction, essays, and poetry. He made his debut with the novel Emma Emma in 2015, followed by Graceland in 2017. LOOK (2020) is a genre-defying work about the role of clothing in literature, in creating and reshaping gender, in political protests, in power relations, in sex and love, and in the precarious labor market. LOOK was critically acclaimed in both Denmark and Germany and nominated for the Politikens Literature Prize. The Ocean in Your Mouth is his fourth book.

Kim Sono (b. 1992) is a Seoul- and Berlin-based nonbinary poet working at the limits of language, sound, and the body. Their practice approaches poetry as a performative site where dreams, oral narratives, and fragmented archives circulate. Through stuttering, silence, and repetition, they resist fixed identity and linear history. They are the author of four poetry collections, Word Dream Body (Vookda, forthcoming 2026), Syncopation (ASIA, 2024), The Film Set (Moonji, 2022), and Night Soccer (Achimdal, 2020).

Olivia Lasky is an Oslo-based translator specializing in Norwegian-to-English literary translations. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she has degrees in English literature and Scandinavian studies, with a focus on Sámi language and culture. She also translates from North Sámi, Swedish, and Danish. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Dial, Words Without Borders, The Southern Review, Two Lines, and The Georgia Review, and by publishing houses including Harper Collins, Seagull Books, and Greystone Books.

Eunice Lee is a poet, researcher, and translator of Korean literature. She is the translator of Syncopation by Kim Sono (ASIA, 2024) and Fruit of Life: Poems by Kim Myeong-sun (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2026). Her poems and translations can be found in Asymptote, Circumference, The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Harvard Review, and more. She is pursuing a PhD in English at Harvard University.

Sophia Hersi Smith is a translator living in Copenhagen. Together with Jennifer Russell, they have translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Olga Ravn, and Solvej Balle.