Tony Morris was born in North Carolina, and spent his childhood in the Appalachia Mountains of North Georgia and Eastern Kentucky. Much of his fiction and poetry and reflects the region’s influence on his imagination. He moved to California in his early teens, then headed back to North Carolina in his early twenties. Until his mid-thirties, Morris worked a series of odd jobs (bicycle repairman, window glazier, encyclopedia salesman) and ten years as a machine operator in a carbon paper factory.
In 1992, Morris quit the factory job, started to college, and found a life in journalism. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University, and currently works at Georgia Southern University, in Savannah, GA where he teaches creative writing and works as the associate editor of Southern Poetry Review. He is the director of the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat.
In addition to his fiction, Morris has published four books of poetry, including his most recent Pulling at a Thread (Main Street Rag, 2015), a finalist for both the 2014 Anhinga Poetry Prize, and the Philip Levine Poetry Book Prize. Greatest Hits: 1996-2011 was published by Kattywompus Press (2013), Back to Cain, was published by The Olive Press (2005), and his first book of poems, Fugue’s End won the 2004 Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Award, published by Birch Brook Press. He has been awarded the Louisiana Literature Prize, and the Tennessee Writers Alliance Award, and is published in over fifty national journals, including: Spoon River Review, Hawai’i Review, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, Meridian, The Sewanee Theological Review, South Dakota Review, Potomac Review, and many others. His poems are also widely published in anthologies, including: Georgia Poetry Anthology (Negative Capability Press, 2015), Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina(2014), What Matters (2014), Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia (2012).