Poet. Essayist. Educator.
Nicole Morris is a poet who writes essays. Her writing has been featured in North American and Irish journals such as The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, The Indiana Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. Nicole has been supported by Tin House, DISQUIET, and Roots.Wounds.Words. She was shortlisted for the 2024 DISQUIET International and Indiana Review nonfiction prizes. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Western Ireland, where she is putting the final touches on a debut memoir-in-essays about girlhood, inherited anguish, and forgetting as a survival tactic.
I write lyrical, story-driven personal narratives that explore the dangerous nature of truth when we tug at the loose threads of memory and grapple with the messiness that can accompany remembering. My work contends with the hybridity and complex dualities that make up the shape of a life; the both, and, and also's that exist in truth-telling and secret-keeping.
"It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster to not be found," DW Winnecott
About Nicole
Nicole Morris is a working-class, biracial Black mother, poet, and essayist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She holds an MA in Education, with a research emphasis on Decolonial Practices in Education, from Prescott College and an MA in Writing from the University of Galway, Ireland.
Writing across genres, Nicole finds that poetry and prose inform all aspects of her life as a mother, scholar, and educator. Her work contends with the intersections of identity, power, grief, and shame through the framework of family. Nicole has more than twenty years of teaching experience, most recently at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she spent ten years in the Creative Writing department.
She currently lives next to the sea in the West of Ireland.
