Duriel E. Harris
Duriel E. Harris is a poet, performer, sound artist, and scholar. She is author of three critically acclaimed print volumes of poetry, including her most recent, No Dictionary of a Living Tongue (Nightboat, 2017), Drag (2003), and Amnesiac: Poems (2010). Multi-genre works include her one-woman theatrical performance Thingification, the video collaboration Speleology (2011) with artist Scott Rankin, and the conceptual sound project Blood Labyrinth. Recent appearances include performances at the Lake Forest College Allan L. Carr Theatre, Naropa (Boulder, CO), the Chicago Jazz Festival (with Douglas Ewart & Inventions), Poet’s House (NYC), the Greenhouse Theater (Chicago), The Votive Poetics Workshop (New Zealand), the Art Institute of Chicago, and Festival Internacional de Poesía de La Habana (Cuba).
Cofounder of the avant garde poetry/performance trio The Black Took Collective, Harris has been a MacDowell and Millay Colony fellow and has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation, BAX, PEN America, The &Now Awards, Of Poetry & Protest, Ploughshares, Troubling the Line, and Letters to the Future; and her compositions have been translated into Polish, German, and Spanish. Harris earned degrees in Literature from Yale University and NYU, and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers.
The 2018 Offen Poet, Harris is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University and the Editor of the award-winning lit mag Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.