Poet. Essayist. Educator.
My writing reckons with the intersections of motherhood, grief, identity, coloniality, and liberation. I write across genres, but poetry is my first and true love. I am drawn to writing about the body, and the role that culture and history play in shaping the stories that make and break us.
In addition to my writing practice, I have spent twenty-five years working in communities impacted by systems of dominance and supremacy. My approach to teaching is trauma-informed, rooted in Black Feminist and Critical Pedagogy lenses, and centers the reclamation and amplification of voices historically and intentionally silenced. My work in these spaces is focused on supporting teens and emerging adults in their writing journeys.
Writing Life
As a working writer, I draw power from creating counternarratives that speak to the expansive lived experiences of fully embodied human beingness. We exist and thrive in spite of colonial systems that were constructed to make us feel small and disconnected from the whole.
Story and voice are potent tools for social change and collective re-imaginings of what might be when we are engaged in community and relationality with one another.
Publications & Prizes
Disquiet International Literary Prize Finalist, Nonfiction, March 2024
Contributing poet, Banshee Press, forthcoming, Issue 17, Spring/Summer 2024, Poem: Math
Contributing poet, anthology, When We Exhale, Black Freighter Press, forthcoming 2024
New Mexico Writer's Grant, 2022
Contributing poet, anthology, Land, Language, and Belonging: Poetic Inquiries, Vernon Press, 2022
Co-editor, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, Vol. 19 No. 2: The Breath in Our Bones: Poetic Inquiry in Search of Air, 2022
Contributor, Inside Relationships: Critical Case Studies in Relational Communication, Chapter 4: “The Social Self: Class, Race, and Social Context,” Routledge, 2021
Clients & Collaborations
Black Health New Mexico
Vital Spaces
Santa Fe Community Foundation
University of New Mexico
Presbyterian Health
Delta Group
Aspen Institute
New Mexico Head Start
Upward Bound NM
Santa Fe Public Schools
Institute of American Indian Arts
Working Assumptions
Ile Ife Foundation
2019 International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry
About Nicole
Nicole Morris, MA Ed, is a working-class mixed-race Black girl mother, poet, and essayist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She holds an M.A. in Education from Prescott College. The granddaughter of German tenant farmers from Minnesota on her mother's side and Black Southerners on her father's, she learned about inequity and hierarchies of power at an early age.
Her participation in direct-action and grassroots activism led to involvement in a wide range of community-based organizations such as Food Not Bombs, Earth First!, San Francisco Women Against Rape, the Books to Prisoners Project, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and the Pasadena Public Health Department, Black Infant Health Services.
Writing across multiple genres, Nicole finds that poetry and prose inform all aspects of her life as a mother, scholar, and educator whose research is rooted in the intersections of identity, coloniality, and BIPOC liberation. Nicole has more than twenty years of teaching experience, most recently at the Institute of American Indians Arts in Santa Fe, NM, where she spent ten years in the Creative Writing department. She is the founder and program director of Sista Circle, a creative writing and arts summer intensive for Black girls and gender-expansive youth, held annually in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She currently lives in the west of Ireland, where she is completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Galway.
