Troy Jollimore
is the author of four books of poetry and has authored or edited four books of philosophy, as well as numerous articles, essays, and reviews. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015.
His poems have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, McSweeney’s, the New England Review, Tin House, and The Best American Poetry 2020. His essays have been published in venues including Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, and the New York Times Book Review, and he is a frequent book reviewer for publications including the Barnes and Noble Review, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post.
In 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Stanford Humanities Center in Palo Alto, California.
Born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, he was an undergraduate at the University of Kings College and Dalhousie University, before moving to the U.S., where he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton under the direction of Harry Frankfurt.
He is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Chico. His research interests include normative ethics and meta-ethics; the nature and ethics of personal relationships, particularly friendship and romantic love; the ethics of terrorism and war; the nature of reasons and the relations between moral and other reasons; aesthetics, in particular philosophy of poetry and music; and ethical issues related to artificial intelligence. His most recent books are Earthly Delights (Princeton University Press, 2021) and (edited) The Virtue of Loyalty (Oxford University Press, 2024). With Robert Jones, he cohosts Philosophers on Culture, a biweekly radio program on KZFR; and he collaborates with Robert Jones and Peter Fosl on No Podcast for Old Men, a podcast devoted to the exploration of philosophical issues in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen.
Praise for Earthly Delights:
“This engaging and unusual book mixes humor, philosophy, and political ire, drawing repeatedly on film references to examine palimpsestic constructions of the self […] Jollimore’s riveting language is both familiar and uncanny, somehow as lean and precise as it is lexically rich.”
Forrest Gander
“A vibrant, restless, and deeply intelligent book of poems.”
Paisley Rekdal
“The pages of Earthly Delights are flush with exuberances. […] Earthly Delights positions its reader as part of the end of something evanescent but engrossing, and proves Troy Jollimore an especially percipient kind of witness.”
H.L. Hix
