Fonds F0691 - Lynn Crosbie fonds

Lynn Crosbie, writer and educator, was born in Montreal. She attended Dorval High School and Dawson College in Montreal before moving to Toronto, where she attended York University, obtaining a BA in English and Sociology in 1986 and an MA in English in 1987. Crosbie then attended the University of Toronto, earning a PhD in English in 1996. Her PhD thesis is entitled “Contextualizing Anne Sexton: confessional process and feminist practice in the Complete Poems”. Crosbie has been an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design/OCAD University, the University of Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Guelph and York University, teaching courses in English literature, creative writing, and popular culture.

Crosbie began her literary career writing poetry. Her first book of poetry, Miss Pamela’s Mercy, was published in 1992, followed by VillainElle (1994), Pearl (1995), Queen Rat (1998), Missing Children (2003), Liar (2006), and The Corpses of the Future (2017). Her books of prose and fiction include Paul’s Case (1997), Dorothy L’Amour (1999), Life Is About Losing Everything (2012), Where Did You Sleep Last Night (2015), and Chicken (2018). She co-wrote Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (2003) with Jeffery Conway and David Trinidad, and she is the editor of The Girl Wants To: Female Representations of Sex and the Body (1993) and Click: Becoming Feminists (1997).

Crosbie, also a prolific writer on popular culture, started freelance writing in the early 1990s. She has written features, reviews and columns for magazines, newspapers and literary journals including Maclean’s, the National Post, Fashion, Flare, This Magazine, Hazlitt, Quill and Quire, The Walrus, NOW, Saturday Night and Zoomer. Between 2002 and 2012, Crosbie’s column, “Pop Rocks”, appeared in the Globe and Mail’s Arts Section. She also wrote a column, “Critical Mass”, for the Toronto Star between 2000 and 2004 and a television column in Eye Weekly between 1999 and 2001.

Crosbie's story "The High Hard Ones", published in Saturday Night magazine, won the National Magazine Awards’ gold award for best fiction story in 2000, and her article "Lights Out", published in Fashion Magazine, won the silver award for best short feature in 2009. Her book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, was shortlisted for the 2016 Trillium Book Award.