Triny Finlay (she/her) 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 serial long poem, Myself A Paperclip (icehouse/Goose Lane 2021), explores her experiences with mental illnesses, their treatments, and stigma. Myself A Paperclip won the 2022 Fiddlehead Poetry Prize (New Brunswick Book Awards) and was shortlisted for the 2022 JM Abraham Poetry Award (Atlantic Book Awards). Triny is also the author of the critically-acclaimed books Histories Haunt Us (Nightwood 2010) and Splitting Off (Nightwood 2004), along with the chapbooks Anxious Attachment Style (Anstruther 2022), You don’t want what I’ve got (Junction 2018) and Phobic (Gaspereau 2006).
Triny’s writing has appeared in anthologies and periodicals such as The Ampersand Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2023, Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, The Globe & Mail, Grain, The London Reader (UK), The Malahat Review, Marsh Blue Violet: A Queer New Brunswick Anthology, Plenitude, The Temz Review, University of Toronto Quarterly and Untethered.
Triny’s current research investigates the relationships among formal innovation, documentary poetics, and the elegiac mode in contemporary Canadian poetry, using book-length long poems by authors such as Anne Carson, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Soraya Peerbaye, and Esta Spalding as case studies for her analysis.
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 recent 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 food, trauma, and the body; ekphrastic poetries of place; representations of bisexuality; the relationship between queerness and faith; queering food culture through transgender experience; and representations of mental illness in outsider art.
Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.
Triny is the current Director of First and Second Year for the Department of English. She also organizes the Department of English Reading Series. She serves on, or has served on, a wide variety of departmental, faculty, and university committees.
Watch Triny's interview with Atlantic Books Today magazine.
Read Triny’s interview with Room magazine.