Torrin Greathouse Highlights Trans and Disabled Voices at Webster Reading
By Styx Nappier
Torrin Greathouse, an award-winning essayist and poet, presented her work to Webster students and faculty on Nov. 11 as part of the David Clewell Visiting Writers Series. Fingers snapped around the room as participants resonated with Greathouse’s words, some seeing someone like them on a stage for the first time.
Their most recent book, a collection of poetry titled “DEED,” received the 2025 Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings POETRY Award. The book explores intersections of disability, love, lust and transgender identity. Greathouse read several excerpts aloud during the event.
“I think as someone who’s both trans and disabled, there’s so many ways in which desire is stigmatized,” Greathouse said. “I think there is a dual direction to it, right? As a disabled person, I am infantilized and treated as though no one would ever be interested. As a trans person, I am treated as predatory for having desire and also treated as though no one could possibly be interested.”
Students engaged with Greathouse’s work, raising hands to ask about literary techniques, the revision process and the author’s own struggles that shaped the poems.
“The whole project was really premised on the fact that I have never seen a book or even a particular body of work, a corpus, of sex poems by a trans person. That just doesn’t exist,” Greathouse said.
Elizabeth Hoover, an English and women, gender and sexuality studies professor, helped plan the event and introduced Greathouse’s work to her classes.
Hoover assigned the book in several classes, prompting further discussion through group analyses of Greathouse’s “aching, deliberate craft choices” and assignments asking students to emulate similar poetic forms.
“The way [Greathouse] breaks the line shows the way that that technique can act almost like a language. So it can change the meaning of what else is around it,” Hoover said.
Beyond Greathouse’s literary prowess, the meaning of her work resonated with students across identities.
Bralen Murphy, a computer science major in Hoover’s Intro to Poetry class, had read Greathouse’s work for class, but said the reading helped him gain further appreciation.
“Even as somebody who’s not lived most, if not any, of the same experiences, it just struck as deeply relatable through the different aspects of it,” Murphy said. “Moments that I read through the poetry, felt a little more real than I was expecting them to.”
Tears were shed throughout the event as various students placed themselves in the author’s shoes or, more simply, recognized their own experiences on stage.
Hoover invited Greathouse to inspire students who are LGBTQ+ and/or living with disabilities, offering an example of a potential future.
“Torrin’s transness and disability status are things that infuse their work,” Hoover said. “They’re not things to look over or look beyond, but they’re part of the work and they’re part of what makes the work so vibrant and powerful.”
For Greathouse, being a presenting author isn’t simply a reminder of their accomplishments. After describing experiences with homelessness, including winning slam poetry competitions to earn enough prize money to eat, Greathouse said they find power in being visible.
”I was aware from a younger age of who and what I was. I knew that was not a thing I could survive being,” Greathouse said. “And so now, I see so many queer and trans folks at every school I visit — especially here — and it gives me hope for the future.”
Despite feeling the pressures of a shifting political landscape that threatens the rights of trans and disabled individuals, Greathouse finds a continual importance in writing.
”Don’t give up creating, even if it seems like there’s no space for it. Create even if you’re only creating for yourself,” Greathouse said. “… For the longest time, I made only for myself because I needed to survive. And then eventually it turned out that the work was needed by people beyond myself. And someday your work will be needed by people beyond you as well, whether you know it now or not.”