Tracie Morris

Tracie Morris is an American poet, performer, vocalist, and academic.

Life
Morris was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Morris has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and an M.F.A. in poetry from Hunter College, City Univeristy of New York. She has taught in several institutions of higher education; she is now an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute). She was the 2007-2008 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Career
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, the same year she won the Nuyorican Grand Slam. [[citation] ]] 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.

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. She was also performing with music from the outset of her poetry career—collaborating with musicians she met through the Black Rock Coalition. 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 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 specialist in sound poetry and as an occasional theatrical performer. She has studied British acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London as well as Laban and Meisner techniques in the United States. Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2008 her poem "Africa(n)" was included on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records; produced by Mendi & Keith Obadike).

Publications
Chap-T-Her Won. TM Ink, 1993.
 * Intermission. Soft Skull Press, 1998.

Featured recordings with Elliott Sharp

 * Terraplane: Forgery
 * Terraplane: Secret Life
 * Radio-Hyper-Yahoo