Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. Performance Studies. "In WHO DO WITH WORDS, poet, performer and critic Tracie Morris joyfully and instructively blerds out in her love letter to and lecture on Black speech acts. Riff-reading as philosophizing, she dialogues with J. L. Austin, Samuel R.

Delany, and many others, dropping serious science in the process. A pocket-sized delight, and she keeps it tight!"--John Keene "A visionary, a medium, a storyteller possessed of extraordinary perlocutionary powers, capable of locating and seizing upon a listener's every exposed nerve ending, Tracie Morris is a word magician who can make virtually every utterance into music and manifesto. Face it, all of her manifestos are love tones, for this is how she speaks, what she stands for, what she embodies whether on a stage or in a classroom or a cypher or chatting on the subway. Everyday speech and the poem are collapsed, along with the unconscious, dreams of freedom, the will to exist. WHO DO WITH WORDS simply gives us an even more powerful map to the sunlit, non-binding and non-binary world Blerds have been seeking for centuries."--Robin D.G. Kelley.