Mark McMorris

Mark McMorris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960. He earned a BA from Columbia University and holds several degrees from Brown University, including an MA in poetry and an MA and PhD in comparative literature.

McMorris’s collections of poetry include The Book of Landings (Wesleyan University Press, 2016); Entrepôt (Coffee House Press, 2010); The Café at Light (Roof Books, 2004); The Blaze of the Poui (University of Georgia Press, 2003), which was selected by C. D. Wright for the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and The Black Reeds (University of Georgia Press, 1997), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series prize from the University of Georgia Press.

McMorris’s critical writing has appeared in Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), coedited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. His fiction has been anthologized in Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (Westview Press, 1995), edited by Charles H. Rowell.

McMorris has been the recipient of various other honors, including The Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. He also received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 1999 and 2000.

McMorris has taught at Brown University and University of California, Berkeley, where he served as the Roberta C. Holloway Visiting Professor. He is a professor of English at Georgetown University, where he has taught since 1997. At Georgetown, he served as the director of the Lannan Literary Programs from both 1999 to 2003 and 2004 to 2005 as well as of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice from 2006 to 2009.