Quick Facts
Biography
Troy Jollimore is a poet, philosopher, and literary critic.
Career and education
Troy Jollimore was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia and attended the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University in 1999, under the direction of Harry Frankfurt and Gilbert Harman. He has lived in the U.S. since 1993 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He has been an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (2006–07), the Stanley P. Young Fellow in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2013).
Jollimore's philosophical writings frequently concern ethical issues connected to personal relationships. His first book, Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality, was published in 2001; his second, Love's Vision, appeared in 2011, and his third, On Loyalty, in 2012. He has also published on topics including the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, the nature of happiness, and so-called "admirable immorality."
His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2006. It was also nominated for the 2007 Poets' Prize, and individual poems in the collection received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011. His third, Syllabus of Errors, was published in the same series and was selected by the New York Times as one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2015."
Jollimore's poems have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney's, and Poetry. He is also a frequent book reviewer, writing for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Review, among others.
Books
Poetry collections
- Tom Thomson in Purgatory. MARGIE / Intuit House. 2006.
- The Solipsist. Bear Star Press. 2008.
- At Lake Scugog. Princeton University Press. 2011.
- Syllabus of Errors. Princeton University Press. 2015.
Philosophy
- Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality. Garland Publishing. 2001.
- Love's Vision. Princeton University Press. 2011.
- On Loyalty. Routledge. 2012.