Cornell College grad wins Slamovision 2025 international slam poetry competition

IOWA CITY — It’s not often that “thinking inside the box” is lauded as a winning strategy. But for spoken word poet Henry Morray, it’s the introduction to a winning piece of art.

“These days, I’m thinking inside the box. It’s shaped like a fridge,” the opening line of his poem, “Jack in the Box,” starts with a deep bass and a slow pace.

“My frigid fingers trace the warmth of my belly, Hunger sprouts out my bowels like a beanstalk. Pupils follow the kitchen counter,” he continues, as the pace of his speech picks up. “Fe, fi, fo, fumbling through the kitchen cabinet.”

“No silver spoon in sight. I might hatch a plan to jack giants of their golden geese,” he continues. “But a bronze egg will have to do.”

Morray talks about the middle child and the hungry child in him as he grows up into an adult’s reality, illustrating a stream of consciousness that harnesses every one of the body’s senses.

“I am reminded a bill is due,“ he says, as he rapidly launches into an intimate monologue of how his body and soul are begging, amid all the pressures of life, for release.

But most of all, for change.

Begging to go back to a time before the executive branch’s “dogma was unleashed,” before activists “barked for each family tree uprooted,” before “tax dollars funded genocide” and before “giants stomped on children.”

“I’m thinking out the box now,” he finished. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Out of the faucet, into the sea.”

The poem, played in Dublin, Ireland, on Nov. 6, earned Morray the win in Slamovision’s 2025 international slam poetry competition, where poets competed from 15 UNESCO cities of literature across the world.

Becoming a poet

Morray, 25, has launched his artistic career in just a few years since he was introduced to spoken word poetry in 2022.

In middle school, a seventh grade teacher noticed his talent for writing and encouraged him to enter poetry contests. But back then, he only knew how to write poems that rhymed.

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“I was the type of kid who would be up all night reading a book, like ‘Percy Jackson (& the Olympians),’ but I was never into poetry. I had a limited understanding of what poetry was,” he said. “It was more like ‘roses are red, violets are blue.’ ”

Starting as an engineering major before becoming a marketing graduate from Cornell College in 2023, it wasn’t until his junior year of college that Morray discovered his passion.

He was tapped to be president of the college’s poetry club to ensure it didn’t die. Before long, he was infusing the club with new life, taking members to spoken word experiences off campus.

It was then that he was exposed to Slamovision for the first time in Iowa City.

“When I heard the poetry there, I was like, I think we came to the wrong place,” he said. “There was so much talent, it was amazing.”

But it was there that he won Slamovision’s local contest for the first time. The poet immersed himself into the Iowa City spoken word scene, getting exposure and making connections that would lead to opportunities as an emcee, educator and champion of the art.

Now, the man raised in Cedar Rapids is bringing new life to spoken word poetry in Iowa through his own work, as well as the work of his students.

His poetic style

Morray’s style — a mix of tempos, voice changes, textures and metaphors — takes the listener on a visceral journey they can visualize. He blends callbacks, alliteration and poetic devices with music skills he learned as a band kid in high school, like improvising with volume changes and composing crescendos of speech from soft to loud.

“It is abstract with deep emotions. It’s going to tackle some of the biggest topics we know, from love to hate, and try to make it something we can digest and feel,” said Caleb Rainey, a leading spoken word artist in Iowa known as The Negro Artist and mentor to Morray. “He doesn’t sound like another poet, he sounds like Henry.”

Morray’s love of the art centers on his ability to engage each listener in new and unique ways through themes of love, introspection and social justice. His poems are often reverse engineered as he seeks to answer a question: “How did we get to this point?”

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All of it, he says, is to establish a human connection that doesn’t preach at others, but resonates with them.

“I want them to laugh, I want them to cry. I want them to feel not just the parts that make them feel light, but the parts that make them feel heavy,” Morray said. “When I write a poem, I’m always talking to myself. But I know that because I’m just another human being, if I feel it, someone else will feel it in the audience.”

His prize winning poem, “Jack in the Box,” started with a prompt asking him where he wants to be. He started thinking about it first with his own needs — bills being due — before realizing the needs of the world outside of him.

Through it, the first-generation American and son of Sierra Leone immigrants wanted to feel nostalgia from times before bills were due, before he knew what genocide was, before deportations dominated daily news.

“What I wanted people to feel was a collective feeling of ‘I don’t like where we are as a country and a world.’ It was frustration,” he explained. “To create a future I want and we want as a society, we have to think above and outside our own individual needs. That’s what I wanted people to feel.”

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The next generation of poetry

Now in the Quad Cities, Morray leads poetry workshops for students in the Young Lions Roar program and co-hosts The Roaring Rhetoric Open Mic in Rock Island, Illinois.

Spoken word poetry has long been an outsider to traditional literary institutions. But with the Iowan’s international win among UNESCO Cities of Literature, times may be changing. No matter the country, the power of spoken word poetry transcends language barriers.

Rainey said spoken word poetry, whose growing appreciation internationally is indicative of new inroads, remains powerful because of its ability to build bridges in a fractured world.

“That’s why this competition works on an international level,” Rainey said. “I think it’s a clear indicator of a shift in institutions and because of the appreciation of community and connection. By default, we’re getting more recognition for the craft itself.”

Morray’s contribution to the next generation, colleagues say, will be invaluable in continuing the art form’s momentum. In addition to his other qualities, Des Moines poet Kelsey Bigelow calls Morray “the Midwest’s biggest hype man” for other budding poets.

“Henry is one of one. That has to be why he’s winning,” she said. “Being such an authentic soul and poet shines through every time Henry is doing that.”

Morray doesn’t know yet how poetry fits into his career, but he has ambitions to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry and explore the world’s UNESCO Cities of Literature.

“Poetry, I think, is not something that’s ever going to leave me,” he said. “I know poetry will always be part of my life.”

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.