torrin a. greathouse
Award-Winning Poet and Essayist
Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Fly Trap Poetics: Alienation and the Refusal of Empathy
- Form as an Architecture of Meaning
- Lemons on the Step: Poetry as a Tool for Political Activism
- Disability and Embodied Poetics
- Desire Lines: Writing (Through) the Erotic
- An Evening with torrin a. greathouse
Biography
“torrin a. greathouse is in language’s thrall. She knows a word turns flesh into egress, renders anatomy anomaly, and buries girls like her in ravenous appetites.” –Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
“greathouse’s main tool, aside from rich language, is a sophisticated plunge into the etymology of words they use, showing how understanding their roots helps us understand what they describe . . . . remarkable poetry.” –Library Journal
torrin a. greathouse (she/they) is an award-winning transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. They are the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), winner of the American Library Association’s 2025 Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Prize in Poetry, and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound was chosen as Bustle’s “Best Book of 2020,” NBC Out’s “Best LGBTQ Book to Gift This Holiday Season,” Book Marks’ “Most Anticipated Poetry Collection of Fall/Winter 2020,” Lambda Literary’s “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book of December 2020,” and Chicago Review of Books’ “Must-Read Book of December 2020.”
DEED was featured on Autostraddle’s “The Best Queer Poetry Releases of 2024” list and, according to Douglas Kearney, “To read her stunning DEED is to learn hunger’s grammar and be changed.”
greathouse’s work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, Zoeglossia, The Ragdale Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
greathouse received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Short Bio
torrin a. greathouse (she/they) is an award-winning transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. They are the author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), winner of a 2025 Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Prize in Poetry, and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Their work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. greathouse has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, Zoeglossia, The Ragdale Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
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Publications
DEED
Poetry, 2024
“The poems are frank and luscious. greathouse’s main tool, aside from rich language, is a sophisticated plunge into the etymology of words they use, showing how understanding their roots helps us understand what they describe. This remains remarkable poetry.” —Library Journal
“torrin a. greathouse is in language’s thrall. She knows a word turns flesh into egress, renders anatomy anomaly, and buries girls like her in ravenous appetites. To read her stunning DEED is to learn hunger’s grammar and be changed.” —Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse’s 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn’t always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.
Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Poetry, 2020
The glittering, energetic debut from greathouse seeks to honor and give voices to all bodies: “Before I could accept this body’s fractures, I had to unlearn lame as the first breath of lament,” she writes. Using images and language with surgical precision, greathouse focuses her energy on the body as the site of a “litany of ordinary violences,” a place where scars become stars, where there is power and fear. Here, the body is a space of pain and death (she observes herself as “the first dead son my mother does not bury”), but also birth, beauty, and transformation. For the speaker, the journey from one gender into another is not a form of addition, but a form of subtraction: “Woman/ by inverse proportion. Last light/ passing through the eclipse of a closing eye.” “I admit, I love most what can be removed from me,” greathouse writes. It is the persistence and desire for survival in these poems that makes this collection unflinching in its vulnerability and its power. —Publishers Weekly starred review
“Some girls are not made,” torrin a. greathouse writes, “but spring from the dirt.” Guided by a devastatingly precise hand, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound—selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry—challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates “buckteeth & ulcer.” She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead.
These poems ache, but they do not surrender. They bleed, but they spit the blood in our eyes. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. “I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.”
Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive. greathouse—elegant, vicious, “a one-girl armageddon” draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Mythology, Etymology, and the Hard Work of Living: a Conversation with torrin a. greathouse – The Rumpus
• Ten Questions for torrin a. greathouse – Poets & Writers
• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound review – Harvard Review Online
• How It’s Made: Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse – Frontier Poetry
Listen to Audio
• Poetry Escapes the Beauty Bind in Wound from the Mouth of a Wound – NPR
• torrin a. greathouse vs. the Truth – The VS podcast
• The Final Girl – Poetry Off the Shelf
Selected Writings
- Read “Dancing in the Dark” — POETRY
- Read “When My Gender is First Named Disorder” — The New York Times Magazine
Sick4Sick
I think my lover’s cane is sexy. The way they walk
like a rainstorm stumbles slow across the landscape.
How, with fingers laced together, our boots & canes
click in time—unsteady rhythm of a metronome’s limp
wrist. All sway & swish, first person I ever saw walk with
a lisp. Call this our love language of unspokens:
We share so many symptoms, the first time we thought
to hyphenate our names was, playfully, to christen
ourselves a new disorder. We trade tips on medication,
on how to weather what prescriptions make you sick
to [maybe] make you well. We make toasts with
acetaminophen bought in bulk. Kiss in the airport
terminal through surgical masks. Rub the knots from
each others’ backs. We dangle FALL RISK bracelets
from our walls & call it decoration. We visit another
ER & call it a date. When we are sick, again, for months
—with a common illness that will not leave—it is not
the doctors who care for us. We make do ourselves.
At night, long after the sky has darkened-in—something
like a three-day-bruise, littered with satellites I keep
mistaking for stars—our bodies are fever-sweat stitched.
A chimera. Shadow-puppet of our lust. Bones bowed into
a new beast [with two backs, six legs of metal & flesh &
carbon fiber]. Beside my love, I find I can’t remember
any prayers so I whisper the names of our medications
like the names of saints. Orange bottles scattered around
the mattress like unlit candles in the dark.