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IOWA CITY — It’s rare that “thinking outside the box” is considered a winning strategy. But for spoken word poet Henry Morray, it’s the introduction to a winning work of art.
“These days I think about the inside of the box. It’s shaped like a refrigerator,” the first line of his poem “Jack in the Box” begins with a deep bass and slow rhythm.
“My icy fingers trace the heat of my belly, hunger springs from my insides like a bean. The students follow the kitchen counter,” he continues, while the pace of his speech accelerates. “Fe, fi, fo, I’m going through the kitchen cabinets.”
“No silver spoon in sight. I could come up with a plan to rob the giants of their golden geese,” he continues. “But a bronze egg will do.”
Morray speaks of the middle child and the hungry child within him as he grows into an adult’s reality, illustrating a stream of consciousness that harnesses each of the body’s senses.
“I remember there’s a bill to pay,” he says, as he quickly launches into an intimate monologue about how his body and soul are begging, amid all the pressures of life, to be released.
But above all for change.
We need to return to a time before the “dogma” of executive power, before activists “barked for every uprooted family tree,” before “taxpayer money financed genocide,” and before “giants trampled on children.”
“I’m thinking about the box now,” he finished. “From the frying pan, into the fire. From the tap, into the sea.”
The poem, performed in Dublin, Ireland, on November 6, earned Morray victory in Slamovision’s 2025 International Slam Poetry Competition, where poets from 15 UNESCO Literary Cities around the world competed.
Become 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 competitions. But at the time, he only knew how to write poems that rhymed.
Poet and Cornell College graduate Henry Morray performs his piece “The Afrobeats of my Heart” during the Iowa City Spoken Word Jazz Jam, held at the Black Angel restaurant in Iowa City on December 9, 2025. Morray won the Slamovision international slam poetry competition and was one of 17 poets from UNESCO Cities of Literature around the world who entered the competition, along with competitors from 15 countries. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)
“I was the kind of kid who would stay up all night reading a book, like ‘Percy Jackson (and the Olympians),’ but I never liked poetry. I had a limited understanding of what poetry was,” he said. “It was more like ‘roses are red, violets are blue’. »
Initially studying engineering before graduating from Cornell College with a degree in marketing in 2023, it wasn’t until his first year of college that Morray discovered his passion.
He was made president of the college’s poetry club to make sure it didn’t die. Before long, he breathed new life into the club, taking members to spoken word experiences off campus.
That’s when he was first exhibited at Slamovision in Iowa City.
“When I heard the poetry there, I was like, I think we’ve come to the wrong place,” he said. “There was so much talent, it was incredible.”
But it was there that he won the local Slamovision contest for the first time. The poet immersed himself in the Iowa City spoken word scene, making himself known and making connections that would lead to opportunities as a entertainer, educator, and champion of the art.
Today, the Cedar Rapids-raised man is breathing new life into spoken word poetry in Iowa through his own work, as well as that 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 that they can visualize. He mixes callbacks, alliteration, and poetic devices with musical skills he learned as a musician in high school, such as improvising with changes in volume and composing crescendos of speech from soft to loud.
“It’s abstract with deep emotions. It’s going to take some of the most important topics we know, from love to hate, and try to make it into something we can digest and feel,” said Caleb Rainey, a prominent spoken word artist in Iowa known as The Negro Artist and Morray’s mentor. “He doesn’t look like another poet, he looks like Henry.”
Morray’s love of art focuses on its 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 one question: “How did we get to this point?” »
Poet and Cornell College graduate Henry Morray performs his piece “The Afrobeats of my Heart” during the Iowa City Spoken Word Jazz Jam, held at the Black Angel restaurant in Iowa City on December 9, 2025. Morray won the Slamovision international slam poetry competition and was one of 17 poets from UNESCO Cities of Literature around the world who entered the competition, along with competitors from 15 countries.
It’s all, he says, about making a human connection that doesn’t preach to others, but resonates with them.
“I want them to laugh, I want them to cry. I want them to feel not only the parts that make them feel light, but also 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 award-winning poem, “Jack in the Box,” began with a prompt asking him where he wanted to be. He began to think about it first with his own needs – the bills being due – before realizing the needs of the world outside of him.
Thanks to him, the first-generation American and son of Sierra Leonean immigrants wanted to feel nostalgia for the days when bills weren’t due, before we knew what genocide was, before evictions 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 that I want and that we want as a society, we have to think beyond our own individual needs. That’s what I wanted people to feel.”
Poet and Cornell College graduate Henry Morray performs his piece “The Afrobeats of my Heart” during the Iowa City Spoken Word Jazz Jam, held at the Black Angel restaurant in Iowa City on December 9, 2025. Morray won the Slamovision international slam poetry competition and was one of 17 poets from UNESCO Cities of Literature around the world who entered the competition, along with competitors from 15 countries.
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.
Oral poetry has long been foreign to traditional literary institutions. But with the Iowan’s international win among the UNESCO Cities of Literature, times could be changing. Regardless of the country, the power of spoken word poetry transcends language barriers.
Rainey said spoken word poetry, whose growing appreciation internationally is indicative of new advances, 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 change in institutions and because of the appreciation of community and connections. By default, we get more recognition for the craft itself.”
According to his colleagues, Morray’s contribution to the next generation will be invaluable in continuing the momentum of this art form. In addition to his other qualities, Des Moines poet Kelsey Bigelow calls Morray “the biggest hype man in the Midwest” for other aspiring poets.
“Henry is one of them. That’s probably why he wins,” she said. “Being such a genuine soul and poet shines through every time Henry does this.”
Morray isn’t yet sure how poetry fits into his career, but he has ambitions to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and explore the UNESCO cities of world literature.
“Poetry, I think, is not something that will ever leave me,” he said. “I know poetry will always be a part of my life.”
Comments: Reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.
Tatiana Schlossberg: granddaughter of JFK, died at 35 after diagnosis of terminal cancer
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The JFK Library Foundation announced Ms. Schlossberg’s death in a statement today.
“Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts,” the statement said. The message was signed “George, Edwin and Josephine Moran, Ed, Caroline, Jack, Rose and Rory”.
Ms. Schlossberg is survived by her husband, George Moran, their three-year-old son and their one-year-old daughter.
She is also survived by her parents, Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Schlossberg, her brother Jack Schlossberg and her sister Rose Schlossberg, married to Rory McAuliffe.
The environmental journalist revealed she was diagnosed with a rare type of acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer, in a New Yorkers essay published on November 22, the 62nd anniversary of his grandfather’s assassination.
I had swum a kilometer in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant
In the essay, Ms. Schlossberg recounted her disbelief. “I couldn’t believe they were talking about me.
“I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick,” she wrote.
Ms Schlossberg was diagnosed shortly after giving birth to her daughter last year, when doctors noticed her white blood cell count was high.
Tatiana Schlossberg. Photo: Getty
Today’s news in 90 seconds – December 31
“Everyone thought it was pregnancy or childbirth related. After a few hours, my doctors thought it was leukemia,” she wrote.
In her essay, Ms. Schlossberg also criticized her cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health or government,” she wrote.
She denounced his cuts in research funding, in particular for “mRNA vaccines, a technology which could be used against certain cancers”.
Ms. Schlossberg’s work has focused on the impacts of climate change. She has published several articles in The Washington Postincluding an investigation into the impacts of climate change on cranberry growers.
In 2019, Ms. Schlossberg also published Discreet consumption: the environmental impact you don’t know exists.
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Northern Ireland’s health service faced “difficult problems” in 2005, with a senior civil servant warning that pressures “will become even more acute in the years to come”.
However, the author of a health study also heard that there was “a strong political and public attachment to the NHS model” in the region and that it had provided an “impartial community resource” throughout the Troubles.
Professor John Appleby launched an independent review of health and social care services in Northern Ireland in 2005.
There is strong political and public attachment to the NHS model in NI
Declassified documents from the Public Record Office in Belfast show that Clive Gowdy, then permanent secretary at the Department of Health, prepared a paper for the academic in which he said the HPSS (Personal Health and Social Care) was “struggling under the combined effect of growing public demands and expectations, rising standards of clinical and social care governance and spiraling costs”.
He said: “There is strong political and public attachment to the NHS model in NI.
“HPSS is virtually the only provider of health and social services here.
“The private sector is small – with, for example, only two small private hospitals – and relatively few people can afford private health insurance.
“Figures for the use of private health insurance show that in 2002, 19% of the English population was covered by such insurance, compared to 10% of households in NI.”
A senior civil servant said there was a strong attachment to the NHS model in NI (Anthony Devlin/PA)
He added: “The value of HPSS is also demonstrated by the fact that throughout 30 years of civil unrest, HPSS has been viewed as an impartial community resource, providing essential services fairly and equitably across community and political divides.
“The HPSS has dealt with, and continues to deal with, both injuries and illnesses directly associated with the conflict, as well as illnesses resulting from the economic stagnation, long-term unemployment and poverty to which the unrest contributed. »
It is clear that these pressures will increase further in the years to come.
Mr Gowdy said services were “facing the challenges of coping with ever-increasing pressures on our health and social care services”.
He added: “It is clear that these pressures will become even more acute in the years to come.
“This will pose real resource challenges and this issue, which concerns health systems around the world, cannot be ignored in Northern Ireland.
“We need open and honest political reflection on how these demands should be met. »
The Permanent Secretary concluded: “The reality is still that although the HPSS provides essential services to the community at all levels, it is unable to guarantee the quality of service it can offer to the public.
“It has not been possible to meet all public demands and the worst manifestations of this deficit have been the long waiting lists for inpatient and outpatient services, queues in emergency departments, the failure to provide new drug therapies to all patients who need or could benefit from them, and the deficit in community social services for vulnerable people and children. »
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The meeting discussed the use of anti-terrorism laws to combat paramilitary flags and murals
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A file held at the Public Record Office in Belfast includes the minutes of a meeting which took place at Stormont House.
A flag belonging to the Ulster Defense Association (UDA)(Image: Liam McBurney/PA Wire)
A meeting at Stormont discussed the use of anti-terrorism laws to combat displays of paramilitary flags and murals in 2004, according to declassified files.
The papers reveal that a senior PSNI official said “comprehensive case law” could be developed within the courts to establish a “clear line between what is acceptable and what is not”.
A file held at the Public Record Office in Belfast includes the minutes of a meeting which took place at Stormont House on March 2, 2004, attended by PSNI representatives, civil servants and representatives from the Community Relations Unit (CRU) and the Community Relations Council (CRC).
The minutes indicate that a previous meeting concluded that a “community approach to the flag issue was preferable to a police-only response.”
Senior officer Gary White told the meeting he had had a discussion with the Crown Prosecution Service regarding the use of the Terrorism Act 2000.
The minute read: “Again, the question of what is and is not acceptable behavior has become an issue, but GW (Gary White) believes that the DPP is in favor of using this provision generally and this is easiest where a flag or mural illustrates an explicit level of support for a paramilitary organization.
“Obviously there will be areas where there will be doubts about what a flag is.
“GW suggested that this issue should be left to the courts and that comprehensive case law could be developed to establish a clear line between what is acceptable and what is not.
“He also reminded the group that there is great sympathy for the idea that what was acceptable during the worst phases of the Troubles may not be acceptable now.”
The minutes indicate that the meeting recalls a test case relating to the display of paramilitary flags in Hollywood, which resulted in the conviction of four people under section 13 of the Terrorism Act.
It was subsequently learned that the CRU had commissioned research from the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University into the issue of flags and emblems.
The CRU’s Billy Gamble said “his preference was for the community to resolve these issues on their own”, but he felt there “had to be a threat of final sanction”.
The minutes state: “The group was clearly impressed by the approaches of the CRU/CRC and expects the outcome of the policy document in June.
“It is clear, however, that there will be times when the community simply cannot stop the paramilitaries from engaging in this activity.
“In such circumstances, the PSNI is content to have the necessary powers under the Terrorism Act to deal with the situation. In short, there is no universal policy that can solve the flag problem.”
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