Triny Finlay was born in Melbourne, Australia and grew up in Toronto. She is a queer poet, writer, teacher, and mother whose award-winning serial long poem, Myself A Paperclip (Goose Lane, 2021), captures the echoes, vibrations, and realities of debilitating mental illness, psych ward life, and stigma. She is also the author of the critically-acclaimed collections Splitting Off (Nightwood, 2004), Histories Haunt Us (Nightwood, 2010), and the chapbooks Anxious Attachment Style (Anstruther, 2022), You don’t want what I’ve got (Junction, 2018) and Phobic (Gaspereau, 2006). Her writing has appeared in anthologies and periodicals such as The Ampersand Review, 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. She lives and works on the unsurrendered and unceded lands of Wolastoqiyik, where she teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.

 

Triny reading at Cool Hand of A Girl, Toronto, June 2018

(photo by Ally Fleming)