❧ ABOUT ☙

Welcome! Thank you for visiting.

My name is Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote.

My literary criticism, translation, and creative writing are published or forthcoming in literary journals like The Adroit Journal, BOMB MagazineBrooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, EcoTheo Review, Full Stop, Guernica, Hong Kong Review of Books, Latin American Literature Today, Matter, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society of America, Rain TaxiRHINO Poetry, and World Literature Today as well as the anthologies Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation (Sundial House, Columbia University Press), The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II (Trinity University Press) and Trespassing in the Archive: Poetry in Conversation with History (Rowan & Littlefield Publishing Group). I have edited the special issue, Ni de aquí, ni de allá: Stories of Migration, Belonging, and Saudade for Portales, the Undergraduate Research Journal of the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University. I am a finalist of the Changing Light Award from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama.

 

❧ Dominus ☙

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If logos, the law of the father, could be personified, the “Master” of Tiffany Troy’s devastating debut collection Dominus is its Hegelian sine qua non. It follows the journey of a “Baby Tiger” whose lyric powers and canonical, mythic transmutations (of Dostoevsky, Whitman, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and the epic Greeks) evince the apprenticeship of a genius. Is it wrong to “want life to matter” amid a wasteland of toxic positivity, double whoppers, trains, and “fathers beyond reproof”? If work involves subjection, rage, and shame, is poetry—the “Lyrical I” of a “shredded soul”—a higher legislature capable of revolt? Darkly funny, virtuosic, and formally ingenious, Dominus offers a cathartic transcendence from paternalist and systemic oppressions, via a symbiotic power dynamic whose pathos rivals Cordelia and Lear. What Troy forges in this trial by fire isn’t “corporate professional” compliance but a soul: the Nietzschean transformations of her speaker move through “the light Blake calls experience” to arrive at sublimity: “the golden center of the heart.”

      —VIRGINIA KONCHAN, AUTHOR OF BEL CANTO

To walk through the world of Tiffany Troy’s astonishing debut collection, Dominus, is to honor the scalding “month that leaves like a lamb” and to acknowledge the “shimmering lunacy” of our world divided by labor, “Google Calendar,” “QuickBooks season,” human brutality, and “how evil always justifies itself through mundaneness / and bureaucracy.” Dominus is origin story: “In the beginning, all we could do was eat, shit, and money. / Deposit and spend money in takeout places where we died.” The speaker is often Cassandra swirling within and against her tragic consequence of speaking the truth-utterance in the face of any cost: the Doctor’s threat of exile, or “She can no longer look herself in the mirror,” or “Knife in hand… ‘To Hell with God.’” The most profound truth Troy impresses is a blueprint to interrogate the inferno of our everyday lives, lyre in hand, each “horrid spring” without compromising the music which survives us, as to never “kill the love in [our] hearts,” and face with dignity the Master and “myopic god who’s fuming.”

      —CARLIE HOFFMAN, AUTHOR OF WHEN THERE WAS LIGHT

Fusing post-confessional bildungsroman with an allegory of late-capitalist corruption, Dominus astounds me with its heat and light, from its earliest “hope for all workers / to receive what they deserve” to its ultimate dread that “You either cooperate / or starve.” Powered by the combustion that unfolds when a valiant creative spirit confronts the “hellish landscape” of one rigged system after another, Troy transforms her speaker’s manifold subjugation into a spectacle of lyric clap back and alchemical escape act—a performance in which even defeat, always at least partly inevitable, is rendered with such tenderness, wit, and truthfulness to human life, it takes on positive value: “Between being afraid and falling asleep, / I curl into a little ball on the wooden floor.” Championing our tired and our poor, the immigrant workers and the “huddled masses yearning to get to work on time,” the outsiders consigned to “a panorama of never belonging” and “every girl who ever thought / maybe she had wronged the world by existing,” Dominus is as insistent on justice as it is baffled by its own hope, and its indomitable, distinctive voice has a power unlike that of any debut collection I’ve ever read, or of any book in recent memory.

      —TIMOTHY DONNELLY, AUTHOR OF CHARIOT

❧ AN INTERVIEW BY MARY JO BANG IN POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Tiffany Troy’s debut poetry book, Dominus, moves continuously up and down Kenneth Koch’s “poetry thermometer,” descending from the lofty realm of Greco-Roman myth—where we encounter Aeneas, Odysseus, Dido, and others—to the YouTube animated BabyTiger children’s TV series. While Ilium burns, our heroine, a “Baby-Tiger” look alike who is also an attorney, makes her way across the city, fighting adversaries in court and gaining the necessary experience to not only endure but triumph in the troublesome world. The poems are filled with icons of pure goodness that act as talismans, among them Maria Goretti, one of the youngest canonized saints in the Catholic Church, stabbed to death at the age of eleven during an attempted rape by a neighbor. She forgave her attacker before her death and he, in time, became a Capuchin Franciscan brother. Behind the writing is the firm Blakean belief, expressed in his “Proverbs of Hell,” that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”[Read more…]

❧ AN INTERVIEW BY JUAN PABLO MOBILI IN THE BANYAN REVIEW

If you are true to the calling of poetry, there are some inescapable steps: you take a deep breath, jump in its unpredictable ocean, vow to read the great poets of the past, and embrace the young poets who intend to carry the message forward. Reading Tiffany Troy’s Dominus, I knew I encountered someone whose work is serious, willing to share intimate truths but not enamored with self-significance, weaving a tapestry where others can find their lives as well.

Tiffany is a poet forged in two traditions: the legacies in the island of Formosa inherited from a stern father and Flushing, Queens, that bestowed, among many Western deities and ghosts, McDonald’s upon her palate. Her poems reflect how power washed ashore in our lives, her passion for the teachings of Greek mythology, and how being curious about being a human being, came to affirm her freedom as a particular self. [Read more…]

❧ REVIEW BY FELIX TORRES IN  PASSENGERS JOURNAL

Tiffany Troy’s debut full-length poetry collection, Dominus, centers around finding openings in spaces of enclosure. 

Restraint takes on many manifestations in the collection, some of them material (“I am chained to the bottom of the sea”) and others ideal (“a Twin, a Wink, / a Key to our repressed psyche”) in an attempt to understand it from many perspectives, as if it were a site to be navigated through. The theme is so rigorously inspected that by the end of the collection the reader comes no closer to understanding who is responsible for restraining the poet: instead of assigning fault, Troy withholds it. [Read more…]

❧ CHARLES RAMMELKAMP ENDORSES TIFFANY TROY’S POETIC COMPLAINTS AGAINST INJUSTICE: A REVIEW IN LONDON GRIP

Expanding upon her chapbook, When Ilium Burns, Tiffany Troy develops the themes of justice and oppression, hope and futility, in her new full-length collection, Dominus. The title, a Greek word meaning “master” (or “owner” – of slaves), harks back to the oppressive character of “Master” who cruelly dominates the narrator of the chapbook. He’s back! Not all of the poems from When Ilium Burns (a clever self-reference as “Ilium” is another name for “Troy,” who burns with outrage as well as compassion), are included in Dominus, but the plight of the immigrant experience in America is at the heart of the collection. [Read more…]

❧ A COLLABORATIVE INTERVIEW WITH MARY PACIFICO CURTIS IN COMPULSIVE READER

Tiffany Troy: Talk to me about the opening poem, “One by One.” I am curious about how the “cry” of “the one who feels age take hold” among the supplicants mirrors the title of Hawk’s Cry. How do you feel this first poem sets up for the rest of the collection?

Mary Curtis: The world of the book is one where small misdeeds ripple into misdeeds on a macro scale, one by one. It is the condition of mere mortals who often cry out against both the inevitable and consequences of their making. There is bitter irony that the “pressed, pleated and fine” congregate around the ultimate human sacrifice memorialized in a church.

Dominus is rife with references to Ilium and the characters of its mythology, which ties neatly with the name of the book’s author. Before I ask you about the other characters that run throughout, I’d love to hear your comments about this. Specifically, should the reader interpret this as yet another dimension to the world you are setting up in the poems?  [Read more…]

PASSENGERS JOURNAL FEATURE AND INTERVIEW ABOUT VOICE, AMBIVALENCE, AND BELIEVING YOUR DAY WILL COME

Poetry is my girl crush, the light that makes me into my best self. It’s the Carrie Mae Weems poster featuring a photograph of people holding hands with the line: “Don’t Worry, We’ll Hold Hands Again.” It’s the late night listening to Mai Der Vang at the alumni poetry reading from what became Yellow Rain at the Mahoney Library and sheepishly asking her a question, the curiosity palpable in my voice. As my mentor Dorothea Lasky says, Poetry is a party into the unknown and through that unknown we can better understand the arc that is our life. It is relational: I am always raised up by the greats before me and my peers writing alongside me, each of us writing toward a place where our dreams and darkest nightmares might be fulfilled. [Read more…]

FEATURE BY CARLOS BARRAGÁN FOR COLUMBIA NEWS & EVENTS

Poetry alumna Tiffany Troy has published Dominus (BlazeVOX [books] 2023), her first full-length poetry collection. Dominus was conceived and compiled during Troy’s time as a student at Columbia. [Read more…]

❧ When Ilium Burns ☙

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In Tiffany Troy’s vibrant chapbook, When Ilium Burns, classical references coalesce with the clutter, cacophony, and “million-dollar dreams” of the modern world. Recurring characters like Master and Baby Tiger lend the work an aura of bureaucratic satire, of bristling absurdist comedy. In tune with the current soul-crushing American zeitgeist, the speakers in her poems are wary and perpetually on the lookout for the crass and the counterfeit. The highest compliment I can pay this whip-smart debut is that Tiffany Troy’s work brings to mind the irreverence and snap-crackle-pop allusiveness of Alan Dugan’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning first book. I can’t wait to read a whole volume of her poems!

      —CYRUS CASSELLS, AUTHOR OF THE WORLD THAT THE SHOOTER LEFT US

Interwoven with Homeric narratives, Tiffany Troy crafts an epic landscape and cosmology of her own in When Illium Burns. The heroes of her poems are filled with desire, longing, doubt, fear, courage, and “million-dollar dreams” that represent the complexities of the human experience and what it means to be alive. The vivid cast of characters that form this cosmology (“Braised Snake,” “Master,” “The Friend,” “Nurse,” “Baby Tiger,” “Little Maria”) are at once both larger-than-life and intimately familiar in their rages and sorrows. The poetry collection deftly traverses boutique law offices, secondhand piano shops, courtrooms, the bottom of the sea, inviting us into its generous, kaleidoscopic imagination. “What for, this cruelty / as I touch the sphere under my neck / all swollen / with this mouth of mine?” Troy asks. The bright fire that illuminates the voices of her speakers and the poet herself is this very sphere, ballooning intensely throughout the collection and beyond its pages.

      —WENDY CHEN, AUTHOR OF UNEARTHINGS

I had never realized, viscerally, the havoc at the heart of piety nor felt, on my own flesh, the loving burden borne by Aeneas as he carried his father away from the burning towers, until I read these new poems by Tiffany Troy. Here is a poet beautifully competent to love’s furor and to its enduring fidelities. There is a new kind of heroism here, and it is thrilling.

      —DONALD REVELL, AUTHOR OF THE ENGLISH BOAT

We abandoned our homeland for bigger dreams” laments the speaker of Tiffany Troy’s chapbook, but the poetry here is made all the richer by the migratory quality of the text. What I enjoy most about this work is Troy’s willingness to allow the poem to find its own form. This text is all the more surprising and remarkable by its ranginess and generous flexibility. It’s a work you won’t forget!

     —KYLE McCORD, AUTHOR OF REUNION OF THE GOOD WEATHER SUICIDE CULT

REVIEW BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP IN LONDON GRIP

Given the names of the characters in Tiffany Troy’s poetry chapbook, When Ilium Burns – Master, Friend, Nurse, etc. – one is tempted to think of this collection as an allegory, like Everyman or like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Orwell’s Animal Farm. If so, what is the moral, the lesson? What’s the hidden meaning? [Read more…]

“NOT ANOTHER GREEK TRAGEDY”:  REVIEW BY NICOLE YURCABA IN SAGE CIGARETTE

It’s a prayer, an incantation, of desire and return. It’s also a moment in which the speaker is truly comfortable with themself — a new experience for both the speaker and the readers of this collection. [Read more…]

“IN REVIEWBY SHANNON VARE CHRISTINE in VAGABOND CITY LIT

While reading Tiffany Troy’s When Ilium Burns the line “brain to dissociate, / and to upgrade itself into running faster and harder” jumped off the page for aren’t we all in a semi-constant state of dissociation? Multitasking at breakneck speed, instant messaging and downloads, always becoming more efficient and readily accessible. Within this constant state of more, it is increasingly more effortless than ever to disconnect from life, each other, and the world, to disappear into technology, work, and politics. [Read more…]

“I BRACE MYSELF WITH MY HANDS HELD UP: REVIEW BY JONATHAN FLETCHER in WHALE ROAD REVIEW

Tiffany Troy’s debut chapbook, When Ilium Burns, is nothing if not successfully ambitious and daring.  With titles like “Wedding-bound Million-Dollar Dream” and “Notes on the word ‘impossible,’” lines that effortlessly code-switch between English and Mandarin, and lineation, spacing, and stanzaic arrangement that defy expectation, oscillating between the traditional and the most contemporary (all the while varied with different points of view, sometimes multiple within a single piece), When Ilium Burns proves itself both self-aware and equally capable.  [Read more…]

INTERVIEW WITH LISA HASELTON

What I enjoy most about writing poems is following a character’s arc in reaching an epiphany. That epiphany more often than not does not resolve the underlying conflict, for want of power. Nevertheless, it sheds light upon the journey as an experience worthy of our consideration or contemplation. [Read more…]

INTERVIEW IN NEWTOWN LITERARY

My writing often draws from the sounds, cadences, and colors of Queens. Queens has grown to be more than home, as a way of being and thinking. Montages of sound and visual collages come to mind when I think of Queens. [Read more…]

INTERVIEW IN TUPELO QUARTERLY

The characters in When Ilium Burns struggle through what tradition has pinned them down as the holy trifecta of juvenile, woman, and alien. In that way, it’s not dissimilar from Alice’s Wonderland where the rules of the game ensure the characters’ defeat until the characters move outside of the rules, as the other. What makes the book interesting to write is how there is no fixed idea of social justice: no perfect protagonist or antagonist, but complicated human beings. [Read more…]

❧ Interviews & Reviews☙

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Kind Words

❧ Tiffany Troy brought energy, thoughtfulness and imagination to the interview process. Well-prepared and efficient (though I never felt rushed), she made our conversation a mutual exploration of ideas we cared about.

❧ As an avid reader of reviews and literary essays, I can say with confidence that is rare to see such an artful balance of critical rigor and generosity of spirit. Ms. Troy’s literary criticism is marked by a remarkable clarity with respect to the relationship between craft and affect, poetic technique and larger claims about culture and philosophy, and of course, literary citizenship and social justice.

❧ “A Conversation with Dara Barrois-Dixon about Nine,” The Adroit Journal;

❧ “I have only ever wanted the red sky to turn blue: A Conversation with Mary Jo Bang about A Film in which I Play Everyone” Rain Taxi;

❧ “i strike where my cunning becomes feminine: A Conversation with India Lena González about fox woman get out!” Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “Over time, the most foreign of sounds can feel natural in the mouth: A Conversation with Valerie Hsiung about To Love an Artist” Matter;

❧ “I bask, a fugitive from the confines of my own words: A Conversation with Margo Jefferson about Constructing a Nervous System Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “She takes the open fifths into the choir of her heart: A Conversation with Marianne Worthington about The Girl Singer” Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “to return to dying between two cupped hands: A Conversation with James Fujinami Moore about indecent hours Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “Another Me Exists in a Cabin by the Lake: A Conversation with Andrew Grace about Sancta (with Emma O’Leary) Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “Rubbing a pummeled sky: A Conversation with Yerra Sugarman about Aunt Bird” Tupelo Quarterly;

❧ “An Interview with Sean Singer about Today in the Taxi,” Compulsive Reader;

❧ “The cosmos in the daffodils: A Conversation with Translators Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and E.J. Koh about The World’s Lightest Motorcycle by Yi Won,” The Adroit Journal;

❧ “I want to visit what once was a God and became poetry, became shard: A Conversation with Aviya Kushner about Wolf Lamb Bomb,” EcoTheo Review;

❧ “The Sky Never Left the Sky: A Conversation with Mai Der Vang about Yellow Rain,” Heavy Feather Review

❧ CREATIVE WRITING☙

"Sea Floor" in BOMB Magazine
"Crocodile State" in Passengers Journal, read by Hannah Newman

❧ “If I have grandchildren with this accent” by Ana Carolina Quiñonez Salpietro,” translated from the Spanish, Guernica (forthcoming);

❧ “My teenage room” by Ana Carolina Quiñonez Salpietro,” translated from the Spanish, The Queens Review (forthcoming);

“Bone Broth” and “Dead Horse Bay,” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, Constellation: Latin American Voices in Translation (Sundial House, Columbia University Press) (forthcoming);

❧ “Never Surrender Your Heart to a Nuclear Power Plant,” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II (Trinity University Press) (forthcoming);

“Dead Horse Bay,” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, World Literature Literature Today (March 2024);

“Son of a Policeman,” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, Poetry Northwest;

❧ “Never Surrender Your Heart to a Nuclear Power Plant,” “In the Line of Fire,” and “Dead Horse Bay,” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, Latin American Literature Today (English translation) (Spanish original);

“Atlas” and “Y2K” by Santiago Acosta, co-translated from the Spanish with the Women in Translation Project at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author, On the Seawall;

“diamond & rust” (sections 1 and 2) by Catalina Vergara, translated from the SpanishInternational Human Rights Art Festival

❧ “Sea Floor,” BOMB Magazine;

❧  “The Sky” in interview with Mary Jo Bang about Dominus, Poetry Society of America;

❧ “Train” and “Plus Ultra,” Matter;

❧ “Crocodile State,” Passengers Journal;

“Telos,” “Bagel Oasis,” “My Mother as Wallpaper,” and “Spring Rhythm,”  New World Writing;

❧ “A Thank You Card,” and “Wedding-Bound Million-Dollar Dream,”  As It Out To Be;

❧ “Imagine the sky without twilight,” Moss Puppy;

“An Elegy to the Venus of Willendorf,” “When Angels Sing,” and “Aftermath at the Foot, Repenting,” Marbled Sigh;

“This,” “Valley of Ashes,” and “Shepherd of Troy,”  Encephalon Journal;

❧ “In the Spirit of Christmas,” Some Kind of Opening;

❧ “Hermione Granger” and “America in the Year of the Pig,” Mason Street;

❧ “We’ll play Symphony 40 in G Minor through the dark night,” The Minison Project Sonnet Collection Series;

❧ “A Familial Scene“, As It Ought to Be;

❧ “Shepherd Girl,”  Roi Fainéant;

❧ “Squirrel on an October Late Afternoon,” Moot Point;

❧ “What’s Left of the Majesty of Children,”  The Pine Cone Review;

❧ “Pretext,” Snakeskin

❧ TEACHING & EVENTS ☙

As an educator, I encourage my students to revise their work with a critical eye towards structure and the connection between meaning and content. As a public speaker, I hope to help my audience build towards a community with a deeper sensitivity to their surroundings and empathy within their communities. I have been invited to participate in readings, panels, and lectures at Columbia University, New York University, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Pocket MFA’s Independent Publishing Group, Universidad Diego Portales, Stuyvesant High School,  Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Brooklyn Public Library, POWERHOUSE Arena, Housing Works Bookstore, McNally Jackson Books, P&T Knitwear, Yu and Me Books, and many other public venues. I am a Pre-College instructor at Columbia University and was previously a Fordham University School of Law Center of Law and Information Policy Privacy Educator, Metropolitan Museum of Art Teen Advisor, Joan Mitchell Foundation Young Adult fellow, Whitney Museum Youth Insights Artist and Writer, Columbia Undergraduate Creative Writing Department’s Chair’s Fellow, and Artists/ Teachers Humans in Harmony coordinator and Community Course instructor.

I am grateful to have received support from Columbia University, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Kundiman.

For all inquires, kindly contact me using the mail icon at the top-left corner of the web page.