David Morice
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David Jennings Patrick Morice September 10, 1946 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
Dave Morice (born September 10, 1946) is an American writer, visual artist, performance artist, and educator. He has written and published under the names Dave Morice, Joyce Holland, and Dr. Alphabet. His works include 60 Poetry Marathons, three anthologies of Poetry Comics, The Wooden Nickel Art Project, and other art and writing. He is one of the founders of the Actualist Poetry Movement.
In 2013, a biography of Morice was written by Tom Walz, Professor Emeritus of the University of Iowa and Joye Chizek, artist and writer called "Dr. Alphabet Unmasked: Inside the Creative Mind of David Morice". The biography feature numerous photos and illustrations as well as a complete listing of published works by Morice.
David Jennings Patrick Morice was the oldest of five children, born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Gilbert Morice, a Navy pilot, and Lillian Murray Morice, a ballet student. At age 6, he wrote and illustrated rhymed porquoi poems for his mother. In grade school he drew Billy the Hobo Bee, a comic strip. In high school, he wrote Frankenstein Versus the New York Yankees, an unfinished novel.
In 1969, he received a BA in English with a creative writing minor from St. Louis University, where he studied under John Knoepfle and Al Montesi. Later that year, he moved to Iowa City, Iowa to attend the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He received an MFA from the Workshop in 1972, and an MA in Library Science in 1986.
He taught Introduction to Children's Literature, a graduate course in Elementary Education at the University of Iowa, for eight years. He was married to Milagros Quijada, an architect from Caracas, Venezuela, from 1985 to 1991. They have one son, Danny, who taught him "more about children, language, art, wordplay, teaching, and life than words can express."
He is the Associate Editor of Sackter House Media, which publishes books by and about people with disabilities. He teaches writing classes at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
In high school, he wrote and illustrated his first book-length work, The Idiot and the Oddity: A Children's Epic Poem, about a leprechaun named Scratch O'Flattery. Divided into seven chapters called "Books," the poem consists of approximately 1,250 rhyming couplets. It begins with the invocation to the muse:
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