Tracie Morris, originally from Brooklyn, emerged as a writer and performer in the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known locally as a performer in the "slam" scene located in the Nuyorican Poets Café, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, competing in the 1993 National Poetry Slam in San Francisco, along with her NYC teammates Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz, and Regie Cabico. Soon after, she began touring with Estep and other slam poets around the country and abroad, including Dael Orlandersmith, Mike Tyler, and Paul Beatty, and performed her work on MTV's Spoken Word: Unplugged.

Morris also performed with music from the outset of her poetry career-collaborating with musicians she met through the Black Rock Coalition, an organization with which she was affiliated from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. She leads her own band, Sonic Synthesis, and has worked with such internationally recognized musicians as David Murray, Val Jeanty, and Charlie Hunter. Recordings she has worked on with Elliott Sharp include Terraplane: Forgery, Terraplane: Secret Life, and Radio-Hyper-Yahoo.

Intermission, a book of her poems, was released by Soft Skull Press in 1998, her work as a sound artist was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and her theater projects include Afrofuturistic and Sonic Synthesis, both for NYC's The Kitchen. Morris received her Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, and has taught most recently as a Fellow in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania (2007-2008).

The first part of the evening will feature a reading by Morris, who will be joined in the second half for a conversation with Steve McCaffery, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at UB.

Some publications related to this event:
November and December, 2008 - 2008