Prairie Lights

The Iowa City Book Festival presents Writers’ Workshop faculty member Tracie Morris, who will share her latest poetry collection, Human/Nature.

“Tracie Morris is the genius poet of the double-dutch: crafted, elegant, urgent, playful, fun, and musically timed. In human/nature poems, Morris dismantles gentrification, climate violence, space/history travel, ancestry, and inspires us to look at our relationship to what we call ‘nature,’ and what we deem ‘human.’ Our memories are stirred toward ice, discoloration, and with the simple act of opening a refrigerator, we are in the middle of an epiphany, in a constant state of departure even as we arrive. This book is a journey into the future, a requiem, and a boomerang (…)”–Willie Perdomo

Morris is writer/editor of several books and is a poet, professor, performer, voice teacher and theorist. She has performed extensively around the world. Her sound installations have been presented at numerous institutions, including the Drawing Center, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument presented by Dia Art Foundation, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Dia: Chelsea, The Kitchen Performance Space, The Museum of Modern Art, The Silent Barn, and The Whitney Biennial. Morris is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and grants for poetry and performance, including NYFA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well MacDowell and Yaddo residencies. Morris is Professor of Poetry at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.