Mark McMorris

Mark McMorris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960. He holds several degrees from Brown University, including an MA in creative writing (poetry) and an MA and PhD in comparative literature.

His 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 (2003), which was selected by C. D. Wright for the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series and was also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Black Reeds (1997), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series prize from the University of Georgia Press; Moth-Wings (1996); and Palinurus Suite (1992).

McMorris's critical writing has appeared in Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, Xcp: Crosscultural Poetics, Tripwire, and The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. His fiction has appeared in publications such as Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, Callaloo, Conjunctions, and elsewhere.

A two-time winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series, McMorris has been the recipient of various 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.

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