works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, which is what one does with a humanities MA with a concentration in Russian. Her leisure is spent rummaging through second-hand bookstores and knitting sweaters for her much-blinking Sphynx cat, Casaubon—Powell is something of a George Eliot fan. She is the LGBT and Easter Europe editor of 96th of October Editions.

Powell is the first to translate Girlfriend, Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem cycle chronicling her lesbian relationship with Sophia Parnok, “the Russian Sappho.” She is now working on the first translation into English of Zinaida Hippius, a gay trans-man who took Decadent and Symbolist poetry into uncharted depths of Lovecraftian horror. Trotsky wrote, in Literature and Revolution, “I don’t believe in witches, but I’m quite sure Hippius was one.”