Triny Finlay

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.

Research and creative projects

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.

Teaching

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:

• ENGL 1000: Introduction to Modern Literature in English
• ENGL 2195: Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry and Drama
• ENGL 2603: Literature of Atlantic Canada
• ENGL 2608: Introduction to Contemporary Canadian Literature
• ENGL 2703: Introduction to Modern American Literature
• ENGL 2901: Survey of English Literature to 1660
• ENGL 2902: Survey of English Literature 1660-1900
• ENGL 2987: Introduction to Queer Literature
• ENGL 3123: Creative Writing: Poetry
• ENGL 3698: Canadian Literature Since 1970
• ENGL 3883: Women’s Writing in English
• ENGL 5184: Identity in Atlantic-Canadian Literature—Honours Seminar
• ENGL 5188: Innovative Poetics in English Canada Since 1945—Honours Seminar
• ENGL 5189: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem—Honours Seminar
• ENGL 6105: Directed Reading: Critical Race Theory and BIPOC Poets—Graduate
Seminar
• ENGL 6123/43: Creative Writing: Poetry—Graduate Seminar
• ENGL 6623: Innovative Poetics in Canada—Graduate Seminar

Graduate supervision

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.

Recent graduate supervisions

• Rebecca Salazar, PhD (CW: Poetry and Non-Fiction): “ANTIBODY // Traumatic Entanglement, Eco-Poethics, and Speculative Horror as Survivor Futurisms” (Co-Supervisor with Dr. Randall Martin)
• Melissa Spohr, MA (CW: Poetry): “A Pickled Egg for Adam” (Supervisor)
• Ben Dawson, MA (CW: Poetry): “Breaking Things Apart and Putting Them Back Together” (Supervisor)
• Izza Hassan, MA (CW: Creative Non-Fiction): “Ammi” (Supervisor)
• Claire Hoffman, MA (CW: Fiction): “Both/And” (Supervisor)
• Grace Annear, MA (CW: Fiction): “Chronic” (Co-supervisor with Prof. Mark Jarman)

Service

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.