Mark McMorris

Mark McMorris was born in Kingston, Jamaica and educated at Columbia University and Brown University. A two-time winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series award from the University of Georgia Press, McMorris is the author of four books of poetry: The Café at Light (2004), The Blaze of the Poui (2003), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2004, The Black Reeds (1997), and Moth-Wings (1996). McMorris’s collections have been praised by Charles Bernstein for their “intense, articulate, and splendid lyricism crashing against an historical and social imagination that never quite wants to be epic – that distrusts the grandiosity of epic – but which wants to gesture toward the epic.” His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Conjunctions, Callaloo, Hambone, New American Writing, and An Anthology of New (American) Poets. Recently, he was writer in residence at Brown University, and in 2005 was Roberta C. Holloway Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a professor of English at Georgetown University, where he serves as director of Georgetown’s Lannan Literary Programs. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his family.