Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Robin Tremblay-McGaw is a writer of poems, essays, and critical articles and an artist who works with image+text. Robin's books include after a grand collage (Dyad Press 1996), making mARKs (a+bend press 2000), Dear Reader (Ithuriel’s Spear, 2015). She co-authored with Rob Halpern, From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (2017) and a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory on New Narrative (Fall 2021). Her writing has appeared in Tripwire, J2, MELUS, Aufgabe, Crayon, Sillages Critiques, On Contemporary Practice, Feminist Spaces 2.2, JNT, and elsewhere. Poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Three Fold Press Magazine, Fetch, Issue 2. Dogpark Collective, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. From 2008-2017, Robin edited the Bay Area poetry blog xpoetics.blogspot.com.

Her multidisciplinary art has appeared in the magazine Superpresent, and is exhibited in the juried group exhibition "Where From / Where To" (April-June 2026) at the de Saisset Museum. Her work was on view in a solo exhibit--White Paint--during the month of April 2026 at Artists' Television Access Right Window Gallery, San Francisco.

News

Contact: robin@robintm.com

Curriculum Vitae

Poetry

Choral in their conversation with other texts and writers, the world, and lineated or composed in phrasal units, sentences, and paragraphs, my poems are a site of exploration, a means of thinking and feeling, questioning, and experimenting in the fields of language, experience, culture, sound. I am compelled by all the powers and possibilities of poetics, the long tradition of the lyric, documentary and research-based practices, the use of constraints and bricolage methods while also invested in shaping writing attentive to its own form, its aesthetic and formal choices and their consequences.

Multidisciplinary Work

My work uses research, inquiry, and multidisciplinary practices to explore what happens when language, image, painting, and collage collide. Much of my practice is invested in, among other things, the intersection of race and aesthetics, with particular attention to the everyday rhetoric of white supremacy. My ever expanding archive of materials from advertisements, poems, novels, historical and contemporary photos, court documents, journalism, social media, and the art world come into contact with the affordances of my tools: the viscosity of oil sticks, the power of color, the aesthetics of torn paper, depths of charcoal, shapes of brushstrokes, the scrape of a palette knife, shards of language foregrounded or buried, punctures of needle and thread, the charged kinesis of a gesture or a mark. The gestural, visual, and textual vocabularies in concert explode linear narrative and visual logics, enabling me to excavate history and its contemporary presences. This process permits me to witness, reflect on, and unearth complex relations between image and text whether I am sifting through the embeddedness of white supremacy in a plethora of everyday cultural productions and products or considering art’s relation to the cosmos.

Photos by Robin Tremblay-McGaw