![]() | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(March 2024) |
Tracie Morris | |
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Born | Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
Alma mater | Hunter College; New York University |
Occupation(s) | Poet, performance artist and scholar |
Employer | Iowa Writers' Workshop |
Website | traciemorris |
Tracie Morris is an American poet. She is also a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, creative non-fiction writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and non-profit consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris's experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, [1] Tracie Morris earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Poetry at Hunter College and her Ph.D in Performance Studies at New York University with an emphasis on speech act theory, poetry and Black aesthetics, under the supervision of José Esteban Muñoz. She also studied classical British acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and American acting at Michael Howard Studios. [1]
Primarily known for her live performances, Morris has written ten books (as of 2021) and has been heavily anthologized as a writer in multiple genres. She emerged as a poet, performer and writer from the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known as a local poet in the "slam" scene of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, New York, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, the same year she won the Nuyorican Grand Slam Championship. [2] She competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam held that year in San Francisco with other poets from the Nuyorican team. [3]
Morris also won the "national haiku slam" that year and her interest in the form lead her to Asia to research poetic forms and cultures from the region in 1998. [4] She has been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association), Associated Writing Programs, The Shakespeare Society and The Shakespeare Forum. She has performed at Lincoln Center, St. Mark's Poetry Project, CBGB, the 92nd Street Y, Lollapalooza, South by Southwest, The Whitney Museum, MoMA, Albertine, [5] The New Museum, [6] Centre Pompidou [7] (Paris), Centre for Creative Arts(Durban), [8] Victoria and Albert Museum, Queensland Poetry Festival [9] (Brisbane, Melbourne) and many other regional, national, and international venues.
Morris's work is embraced by slam and performance poets, as well as the Language Poets, a contemporary poetic avant-garde. She is featured, for example, on Charles Bernstein's Close Listening radio program, "PennSound". [10] and was featured at a 2008 conference on Conceptual Poetics alongside Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin and others. She received the Creative Capital Performing Arts award in the year 2000. In addition to being an experimental poet, Morris writes poetry in conventional and nonce forms.
Morris is known as a sound artist and specialist in sound poetry, [11] as well as an occasional theatrical performer. She was an early collaborator with Ralph Lemon for his Geography Trilogy. Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. [12]
Morris has taught in several institutions of higher education. She is the first tenured African-American poet of the Iowa Writers' Workshop after serving as the program's inaugural distinguished visiting professor of poetry.
Morris was the 2007–08 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, [13] was a 2018 Master Artist of the Atlantic Center for the Arts [14] and the 2018–19 Woodberry Poetry Room Fellow at Harvard University. In 2021, Morris received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.
Morris leads workshops on creative writing, voice and planning consultations for activists, artists, youth, women, postgraduate students and underserved communities as well as private and non-profit groups.
She has served on board of trustees/board of directors, committees and artist advisory boards for: the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, African Voices, the Black Rock Coalition and other national and grassroots institutions.
She is also a workshop leader for innovative poetry, conducting intensives for St. Mark's Poetry Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Poets' House, Naropa University, Kore Press, and other national arts organizations. [15]
With Elliott Sharp
With Uri Caine
A poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges. While formats can vary, slams are often loud and lively, with audience participation, cheering and dramatic delivery.
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. It covers a variety of styles and genres.
Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play, such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection. Spoken word is a "catchall" term that includes any kind of poetry recited aloud, including poetry readings, poetry slams, jazz poetry, pianologues, musical readings, and hip hop music, and can include comedy routines and prose monologues. Unlike written poetry, the poetic text takes its quality less from the visual aesthetics on a page, but depends more on phonaesthetics, or the aesthetics of sound.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss.
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Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."
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The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy, and theater. Several events during the PEN World Voices festival are hosted at the cafe.
Staceyann Chin is a spoken-word poet, performing artist and LGBT rights political activist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Pittsburgh Daily, and has been featured on 60 Minutes. She was also featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where she shared her struggles growing up as a gay person in Jamaica. Chin's first full-length poetry collection was published in 2019.
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