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' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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.[1] She competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam held that year in San Francisco with other poets from the Nuyorican team.[2]
Morris' 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".[9] 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[10] 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.[11]
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.[14]
^Bastidas, Grace (April 25, 2000). "Bard Wired". Village Voice. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
^Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam.New York City: Soft Skull Press. "Chapter 14: First and Always; Graduates from the NYC Poetry Slam's First Wave"; ISBN1-933368-82-9
Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America by Ed Morales, St. Martin's Press: 2003
Production Notebooks Volume 2 by Mark Bly
Geography: Art/race/exile by Ralph Lemon and Ann Daly
Listen Up! by Zoe Angelsey
Girls Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings From The Girl Zine Revolution by Tristan Taormino, Karen Green, and Ann Magnuson
Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry by Gary Mex Glazner
We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics. edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue.
The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word by Meta DuEwa Jones University of Illinois Press, 2011
Choice Voice Noise: Soundings in Innovative African American Poetry by Kathleen Crown in "Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally" edited by Romana Huk, Wesleyan University Press, 2003
Ranft, Erin (January 2014). "The Afrofuturist Poetry of Tracie Morris and Tracy K. Smith". Journal of Ethnic American Literature
