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
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
. Morris' experimental sound poetry is progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured
professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
at
the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Education
Tracie Morris earned a
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
at
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
and her
Ph.D
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in
Performance Studies
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term ''performance'' is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, ...
at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
with an emphasis on speech act theory, poetry and Black aesthetics, under the supervision of
José Esteban Muñoz
José Esteban Muñoz (August 9, 1967 – December 3, 2013) was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His first book, ''Disidentifications: Queers of ...
. She also studied classical British acting at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London) and American acting at
Michael Howard Studios
The Michael Howard Studios is an acting studio for the performing arts located in at 152 West 25th Street in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City; the studio was founded in 1953 by actor/director Michael Howard.
History
A protégé of both Sanford ...
.
Career
Morris writes about Black culture, power, race, gender, abuse and the body, among other topics, through reverberation and accumulative alterations or substituting, thereby creating dynamic and intimate sound poetry work. 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.
Morris emerged as a poet, performer and writer from the
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets.
Traditionally an im ...
poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known as a local poet in the "slam" scene of the
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Ricans located in or around New York City, or of their descendants (especially those raised or currently living in the N ...
in
New York City, New York
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, the same year she won the
Nuyorican Grand Slam Championship. She competed in the 1993
National Poetry Slam The National Poetry Slam (NPS) is a performance poetry competition where teams from across the United States, Canada, and, occasionally, Europe and Australia, participate in a large-scale poetry slam. The event occurs in early August every year an ...
held that year in San Francisco with other poets from the Nuyorican team.
[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
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
: Soft Skull Press. "Chapter 14: First and Always; Graduates from the NYC Poetry Slam's First Wave" . 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. She has been a member of the MLA (
Modern Language Association),
Associated Writing Programs
The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is a nonprofit literary organization that provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to nearly 50,000 writers, 500 college and university creative writing programs, and 125 writers' c ...
, The Shakespeare Society and The Shakespeare Forum. Her work has been featured in
Fuse Magazine,
The Amsterdam News
The ''Amsterdam News'' (also known as ''New York Amsterdam News'') is a weekly Black-owned newspaper serving New York City. It is one of the oldest newspapers geared toward African Americans in the United States and has published columns by s ...
,
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the crea ...
, Tribes Magazine,
Bomb Magazine
''Bomb'' (stylized in all caps as ''BOMB'') is an American arts magazine edited by artists and writers, published quarterly in print and daily online. It is composed primarily of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplin ...
,
The Brooklyn Rail
''The Brooklyn Rail'' is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The ''Rail'' is based out of Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, criti ...
and San Francisco Weekly as well as many cultural and scholarly journals. She has performed at
Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (also simply known as Lincoln Center) is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 millio ...
,
St. Mark's Poetry Project,
CBGB
CBGB was a New York City music club opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan's East Village. The club was previously a biker bar and before that was a dive bar. The letters ''CBGB'' were for '' Country'', '' BlueGrass'', and '' Blues'', Kri ...
, the
92nd Street Y
92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a cultural and community center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, at the corner of East 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Founded in 1874 as the Young Men's Hebrew Association, the ...
,
Lollapalooza
Lollapalooza (Lolla) is an annual American four-day music festival held in Grant Park in Chicago. It originally started as a touring event in 1991 but several years later made Chicago the permanent location for the annual music festival. Musi ...
,
South by Southwest
South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...
,
The Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
,
MoMAAlbertine The New Museum
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
History
The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New S ...
,
Centre Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...
(Paris), Centre for Creative Arts(Durban),
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
, Queensland Poetry Festival (Brisbane, Melbourne) and many other regional, national, and international venues. She has presented her work throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.
Morris began performing with music from the outset of her poetry career— those initial collaborations beginning with musicians she met as a member of the
Black Rock Coalition
The Black Rock Coalition is a New York-based artists' collective and nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the creative freedom and works of black musicians.
Founding and purpose
The BRC was founded in 1985 in New York City by Vernon Reid ...
. 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 Charles Bernstein may refer to:
* Charles Bernstein (composer) (born 1943), American composer of film and television scores
* Charles Bernstein (poet)
Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary sc ...
's ''Close Listening'' radio program
[PennSound.](_blank)
/ref> and was featured at a 2008 conference on Conceptual Poetics alongside Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff (born September 28, 1931) is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Early life
Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany exa ...
, Craig Dworkin
Craig Dworkin is an American poet, critic, editor, and Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is founding senior editor of Eclipse, an online archive of 20th-century small-press writing and 21st-century born-digital publications.
Ed ...
and others. Morris also received the Creative Capital
Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...
Performing Arts award in the year 2000. In addition to being an experimental poet, Morris writes poetry in conventional forms and nonce forms.
Morris is known as a sound artist
Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art may be interdisciplinary in nature, or be used in hybrid forms. According to Brandon LaBelle, sound art ...
and specialist in sound poetry
Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literacy and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound p ...
as well as an occasional theatrical performer. (She is also a singer with composer/musician Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp (born March 1, 1951) is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer.
A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released ...
's band, Terraplane, and her eponymous band.) Morris was an early collaborator with Ralph Lemon
Ralph Lemon (born August 1, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American choreographer, company director, writer, visual artist and a conceptualist. Raised in a religious environment, he developed his artistic creativity as a child.Diana Stockon, â ...
for his Geography Trilogy. Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...
.[2002 Whitney Biennial List of Artists](_blank)
Morris has taught in several institutions of higher education. She is th
first tenured African-American poet
of the Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative W ...
after serving as the program's inaugural distinguished visiting professor of poetry.
Creative and academic fellowships
Morris was the 2007-2008 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
, was a 2018 Master Artist of the Atlantic Center for the Arts
Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) is a nonprofit, interdisciplinary artists’ community and arts education facility providing artists an opportunity to work and collaborate with contemporary artists in the fields of composing, visual, liter ...
[https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/05/04/sound-poet-tracie-morris-announced-as-atlantic-center-master-artist-for-june] and the 2018-201
Woodberry Poetry Room Fellow at Harvard University
as well as resident at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March  ...
and the MacDowell Colony
MacDowell is an artist's residency program in Peterborough, New Hampshire, United States, founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, pianist and philanthropist Marian MacDowell. Prior to July 2020, it was known as the MacDowel ...
. Grants Morris has received include fellowships of the New York Foundation for the Arts
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...
, Creative Capital
Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...
and the Asian Cultural Council
The Asian Cultural Council (ACC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing international cultural exchange between Asia and the U.S. and between the countries of Asia through the arts. Founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1963, AC ...
. In 2021, Morris received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.
Consultant, workshop leader, panelist
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 is in demand as a panelist, respondent and guest artist on panels, serving for prestigious educational organizations including Modern Language Association, Associated Writing Program, Columbia University, Princeton University, MIT, Pomona College, Dartmouth College, Smith College, University of Arizona, Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, the Cave Canem Foundation, and The Pew Center for Arts and Culture, among others. Morris is a consultant for educational and arts organizations. 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.
Featured recordings
With Elliott Sharp
*''Terraplane: Forgery''
*''Terraplane: Secret Life''
*''Radio-Hyper-Yahoo''
*''Terraplane: Sky Road Songs''
*''4AM Always''
With Uri Caine
Uri Caine (born June 8, 1956, Philadelphia, United States) is an American classical and jazz pianist and composer.
Biography
Early years
The son of Burton Caine, a professor at Temple Law School, and poet Shulamith Wechter Caine, Caine began ...
*'' The Goldberg Variations'' (Winter & Winter, 2000)
Books
Chap-T-Her Won
', 1993, TM Ink
''Intermission'', 1998, Soft Skull Press
Rhyme Scheme", 2012, Zasterle Press
Handholding: 5 kinds, 2016, Kore Press
Best American Experimental Writing 2016
(a.k.a. BAX 2016) co-edited with Charles Bernstein Charles Bernstein may refer to:
* Charles Bernstein (composer) (born 1943), American composer of film and television scores
* Charles Bernstein (poet)
Charles Bernstein (born April 4, 1950) is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary sc ...
, Seth Abramson, Jesse Damiani
Jesse Damiani (born 1989) is an American writer, producer, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his association with virtual reality, augmented reality, and new media art. He is a Forbes Contributor covering emerging technologies.
Early life a ...
, Wesleyan University Press
Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist.
History and overview
Founded (in its present for ...
, 2017
Per Form/Hard Kore: joca seria press 2017
(English with French translation by Olivier Brosard, Vincent Broqua, Abigail Lang)
Who Do With Words: Chax Press 2018
Poetry
401 Requiem
Boating Duozetuor
Slave Sho' to Video Aka Black but Beautiful
The Mrs. Gets Her Ass Kicked
Project Princess
Leonine Viewing
Notes
References
*''The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies'' by Tessa Kale
*''Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race'' by Maureen Mahon
*''The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class'' by Gary Lenhart
*''Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies'' by Robert O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Early life
Edwards attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia.
Career Teaching
Edwards has taught at Rutgers Unive ...
, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
Farah Jasmine Griffin (born 1963) is an American academic and professor specializing in African-American literature. She is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, chair of the African Am ...
*''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
External links
The Land and the People - The Poets.
Personal website
''New York Times'', December 18, 1999.
* ttps://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-abstract/36/3/49/6389/Rakim-s-Performativity?redirectedFrom=fulltext Rakim's Performativity
Speaking for Myself
{{DEFAULTSORT:Morris, Tracie
Living people
Writers from Brooklyn
New York University alumni
Hunter College alumni
American sound artists
Women sound artists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Poets from New York (state)
American women poets
African-American poets
21st-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women
African-American women writers
Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty