Torrin A. Greathouse

Torrin A. Greathouse (stylized in all lowercase) is an American transgender poet and essayist who uses she/they pronouns. Their first poetry collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, won the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and their second collection, DEED, won the 2025 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Poetry Award.

Education and career

Greathouse is from Central California. They received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. While at Minnesota, Greathouse's manuscript for Wound from the Mouth of a Wound was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil for the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, which included publication by Milkweed Editions.

Greathouse teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Their work has appeared in publications including Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Foglifter, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series.

Writing

Reviewers and interviewers have discussed Greathouse's poetry in relation to transness, disability, myth, etymology, desire, violence, and poetic form. In a 2021 interview with Blackbird, Greathouse discussed ekphrasis, etymology, and poetry's ability to examine language that has been used as a weapon. In a 2024 interview with The Rumpus, they discussed the relationship between mythology, religious language, and the body in DEED. Greathouse also told Poets & Writers that the book developed in part from an interest in etymology and inherited language.