2025 Mary Higgins Clark Chair
torrin a. greathouse
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.
Keynote Address and Q & A
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
5:00 pm EST
12th Floor Lounge
Lincoln Center Campus
This event is required for English majors
and strongly encouraged for English minors
Ram Van Tickets are available to Rose Hill students and faculty
by writing to MonaLisa Torres at mtorresbates@fordham.edu
Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A Minnesota Book Award Finalist in Poetry
A CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist in Poetry
A Bustle Best Book of the Year
“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.
Faculty Members
If you are planning to teach Miles Morales: Straight out of Brooklyn,
you can pick up a desk copy at your home campus at the start of the semester.
Gallery
The Mary Higgins Clark Chairs
The Mary Higgins Clark Chair
The English Department at Fordham University is deeply grateful to the renowned novelist and FCLC alumna, Mary Higgins Clark, for endowing The Mary Higgins Clark Chair. Each year, an acclaimed genre writer joins the Fordham community giving our students access to superlative mentoring and advice.
The Queen of Suspense
The #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark wrote forty suspense novels, four collections of short stories, a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. With bestselling author Alafair Burke she wrote the Under Suspicion series including The Cinderella Murder, All Dressed in White, The Sleeping Beauty Killer, Every Breath You Take, You Don’t Own Me, and Piece of My Heart. With her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, she coauthored five suspense novels. More than one hundred million copies of her books are in print in the United States alone. Her books are international bestsellers.
