torrin a. greathouse
Visiting Poet
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torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet, essayist, and educator who professes her work to be “a mixture of myth and biography arranged to tease the most truth out of the telling.” Described by poet Danez Smith as a reluctant formalist, the inventive poems in her debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020) invoke the ineffable ability of language to conjure and contain notions that typically resist definition. Her insights on trauma, memory, and selfhood are suffused with nuance, informed by her intersecting identities as a trans, disabled, neurodivergent woman and survivor. In her poems, the body at the focal point of these intersections is variously described as kindling, an unfinished moth, and a repeatedly revised rough draft of a coast. Exploring the dichotomously physical and existential space in which the self lives, her work affirms the intrinsic value of every body, and demonstrates that irregularity is not a defect, but a doorway.
greathouse is also the author ofDEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), which continues to explore themes of identity and perseverance. Her work has been featured in POETRY, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review, and has earned fellowships and grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity. She currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Co-sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature, the Study of Women and Gender, and the Smith College Accessibility Resource Center.
greathouse will read at Leo Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 7 p.m. Livestreams will be available on BDPC Facebook and YouTube pages.