Troy Jollimore

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Troy Jollimore (born 1971) is a Canadian-American poet, philosopher, critic, and professor at California State University, Chico. He was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and studied at the University of King's College in Halifax before earning a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1999. He has lived in the United States since 1993.

In philosophy, Jollimore’s work often connects ethics to personal relationships, exploring friendship, love, loyalty, and their challenges. He has written three books on these topics: Friendship and Agent-Relative Morality (2001), Love's Vision (2011), and On Loyalty (2012). His papers frequently examine the philosophy of friendship and romantic love, the ethics of terrorism, the depiction of evil in literature, happiness, and the aesthetics of poetry and dance.

As a poet, Jollimore has published several collections. His debut, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (2006), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was praised for its wit and craftsmanship. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, and his third, Syllabus of Errors (named one of The New York Times’ Best Poetry Books of 2015), followed. His 2021 book Earthly Delights received acclaim for blending humor, philosophy, and film references to explore self and memory.

Jollimore’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Poetry. He also writes book reviews for major outlets such as The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times Book Review. In Love’s Vision, he argues that love has reasons but also strong non-rational elements, proposing a “Vision View” of love that treats love somewhat like perception. His later work expands on autonomy, identity, and anxiety in love and friendship, and he often analyzes films in his writing, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Big Lebowski, Her, Rear Window, and Vertigo.