The Iowa Writers' Workshop and the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences are delighted to announce that Tracie Morris has joined Jamel Brinkley, Margot Livesey, Charles D’Ambrosio, Ethan Canin, James Galvin, Mark Levine, Elizabeth Willis, and Lan Samantha Chang as a permanent Workshop faculty member.
Dr. Morris joined the Workshop this fall as a full professor with tenure and will teach Graduate Poetry Workshop courses and Form of Poetry seminars to students enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. She was the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Workshop for several semesters before joining the permanent faculty, and she is the first tenured African American full professor of Poetry in the history of the Workshop.
"We are so excited that Tracie is joining our permanent poetry faculty,” says Chang, director of the Workshop and Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor of the Arts. “Her expertise and brilliance of innovation as a poet and performer is revolutionary. She is also an exceptional and inspiring teacher."
Tracie Morris is an innovative poet and sound artist at the intersection of formal poetry, hiphop and avant garde art. Her most recent collection of poetry is Hard Kore: Poemes/Per-Form: Poems of Mythos and Place, which was published in 2018 in French and English, and her work has been featured in dozens of anthologies. In 2019, Chax Press published an expanded edition of Dr. Morris’s creative non-fiction, Who Do with Words. She has performed, researched, and presented work in over 30 countries. Venues for her performances, sound installations, and talks include Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Kwazulu Natal, the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Université Paris-Diderot, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning and the New Museum. She has received numerous honors, including fellowships from Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Creative Capital Foundation, Franklin Furnace and the Asian Cultural Council as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Millay and MacDowell colonies. For more than twenty years, Dr. Morris has taught in institutions of higher education. She received an MFA at Hunter College and a PhD at New York University and she studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
Photo credit | Rachel Eliza Griffiths