Biography
Ronnie Moore is a Southern Black lesbian poet from North Carolina whose work dwells at the intersections of memory, music, and Black becoming. Holding both a B.A. and an M.A. in English with concentrations in Creative Writing, she approaches poetics as a site of excavation—where language unearths what history buries and imagines what freedom requires.
Before making Illinois home, she taught fourth-grade Reading, carrying with her a belief that words can both shelter and transform. Her poems move through the intimate geographies of Black existence, Black queer identity, the body, mental health, gender, and sexuality, writing with radical transparency toward what is often left unsaid.
Steeped in the improvisational spirit of jazz, Moore's work bends toward tension without abandoning tenderness. She is interested in the music of difficult conversations—inherited grief, embodied joy, ancestral memory, and the sacred labor of telling the truth. Her poetry asks what becomes possible when we choose to witness ourselves fully, allowing beauty to emerge not in spite of trauma, but through our willingness to name it.
Research Interests
- African American Literature & Culture
- Black Lesbianism
- Gender/ Sexuality
- The Body
- Jazz/ Blues Music
- Radical Acceptance
- The Tradition of Poetry in the Black Community
- Mental Health
- Enslavement
- Collective/ Inherited (Cultural) Trauma
Research Description
My poems return to the body as both archive and prophecy. They linger where Black queer existence refuses erasure, where history breathes beneath the skin, where inheritance is carried not only in memory but in muscle, marrow, and mouth. I write toward the places where trauma learns the language of survival, where fear and love become kin, where religion is both wound and sanctuary, and where freedom remains a question, the poem must ask again and again.
I am drawn to the traditions of poetry and theory as acts of listening—as ways of naming what history has rendered unspeakable and imagining what language has yet to hold. The afterlife of slavery is not distant to me; it echoes through gesture, silence, family, desire, and the ordinary rituals of living. My work traces those echoes, searching for the moments when the body remembers what the mind cannot, and when remembrance itself becomes a form of liberation.
I read beyond borders. African American literature is my home, but never my horizon. My lineage is made richer by voices gathered across continents, languages, and histories—writers who remind me that every poem is a conversation with the living, the dead, and those still becoming. I write to enter that conversation with humility, curiosity, and the belief that language, when asked to tell the truth, can make room for lives larger than the stories we have inherited.
Education
- BA, English/Creative Writing, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
- MA, English/ Creative Writing (Poetry), University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Awards and Honors
- Advancing the Dream Scholarship, 2022
- James McGavran Award, (Writing about nature and/or place), 2023
- Graduate College Fellowship, UIUC, 2026
Courses Taught
- Rhet. 105 (Fall 2026)