Tracie Morris is an American poet, performer, vocalist and academic originally from Brooklyn, New York.
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Morris emerged as a performer and writer from the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known as a local performer in the "slam" scene located in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, New York, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team. She competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam held that year in San Francisco along with her Nuyorican teammates Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz and Regie Cabico.[1]
Soon after, she began touring with other "slam poets" around the country and abroad, including Maggie Estep, Dael Orlandersmith, Mike Tyler and Paul Beatty and performed her work on MTV's Spoken Word: Unplugged.[2] She was also performing with music from the outset of her poetry career—collaborating with musicians she met through the Black Rock Coalition, an organization that she was affiliated with from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. 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 [3] | Close Listening radio program and was featured at a 2008 conference on Conceptual Poetics alongside Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin and others.
Morris is now known as a sound artist and sound poet and as an occasional theatrical performer. Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.[4] In 2008 her poem "Africa(n)" was included on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records; produced by Mendi & Keith Obadike). Morris has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, CUNY; and has taught in several institutions of higher education (she is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute). She was the 2007-2008 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
Terraplane: Forgery Terraplane: Secret Life Radio-Hyper-Yahoo
Intermission, 1998, Soft Skull Press Chap-T-Her Won, 1993, TM Ink
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