Triny Finlay is a white settler poet and writer, living and working on the unsurrendered and unceded lands of Wolastoqiyik.
Triny’s creative work intersects with her research and teaching interests, which include creative writing, contemporary Canadian literatures, poetics, the long poem, genre theory, and gender and sexuality in literature.
Triny’s latest poetry collection, Myself A Paperclip (icehouse/Goose Lane 2021), explores her experiences with mental illnesses, their treatments, and stigma, all in the form of a polyphonic serial long poem. She is also the author of the critically-acclaimed books Splitting Off (Nightwood 2004) and Histories Haunt Us (Nightwood 2010), along with the chapbooks You don’t want what I’ve got (Junction 2018) and Phobic (Gaspereau 2006).
Triny’s writing has also appeared in anthologies and periodicals such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, The Globe & Mail, Grain, G U E S T, The London Reader (UK), The Malahat Review, Marsh Blue Violet: A Queer New Brunswick Anthology, Periodicities, Plenitude, Reversing Falls, Ryga, The Temz Review, and Untethered.
Her current writing project—a genre-breaking book of ekphrastic poem-essays, entitled Out of Water—considers the concept of discomfort in relation to the ideological and aesthetic impulses of contemporary visual art installation projects by a range of international artists, including Heather Benning, Lee Bul, Cassils, Los Carpinteros, Monster Chetwynd, Christo, Ruth Cuthand, Cornelia Parker, and Amalia Pica.
Triny approaches teaching from a feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial perspective, with a strong focus on issues of social justice, often informed by her own positionality as a queer, cisgender woman who lives with chronic mental illness. In the past five years, she has taught the following courses, troubling conventional conceptions of the English literary canon and challenging colonial, racist, and cis-heteronormative narratives:
Triny has supervised creative graduate theses in poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction, covering a wide range of fields and ideas, such as: feminist poetics of ecological and personal trauma; the effects of immigration and dislocation on women’s and children’s lives; the intergenerational impact of exile and genocide; women’s lived experiences of chronic illness; feminist poetics of the body and body image; ekphrastic poetries of place; representations of bisexuality; and representations of mental illness in art and literature.
Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.
Triny is the current Director of First and Second Year for the Department of English. She also co-organizes the Department of English Reading Series. She serves on, or has served on, a wide variety of departmental, faculty, and university committees.
Read Triny’s interview with Room magazine.