“The tragic mulatto,” wrote the African American poet Sterling Allen Brown in a 1933 meditation on stereotype, “is a victim of a divided inheritance”: pulled this way and that, belonging nowhere. In 10 lyric essays shifting keys from Virginia, where he grew up, to Tucson, his first home as a young man, Matthew Morris sounds the depths of that embodied cliché: its fracturing simplifications, its (partial, mixed) truths. The light-skinned son of an African American father and a white mother, he asks after the skin-housed present by way of the rooted past, considering his late grandmother, a painter whose grandparents left Due West, South Carolina for Evanston, Illinois in the decades before her birth; the twice-made film Imitation of Life, which in its first iteration starred the light-skinned actor Fredi Washington; and the quiet gradations of color in an untitled Rothko print. Ever-searching, The Tilling is an excavation of identity and a reflection on the beginnings of life and love—a (sometimes soft, others chippy) biracial coming of age.

Son of an African American father and a white mother, Matthew Morris writes through questions of race, identity, family history, and love. His nonfiction has been published in Seneca Review, Fourth Genre via the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, and Mid-American Review through the AWP Intro Journals Project, and he has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His essay “Tidal Wave,” published in apt, was cited as “notable” in Best American Essays 2020. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Missouri –Columbia.

Matthew will be joined this evening by Sara “Eszi” Waters, who will also read from their work. Eszi is a poet, essayist, and parent at the University of Missouri – Columbia working towards their PhD in English/Creative Writing. Eszi’s work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Shelia-Na-Gig, and elsewhere. Their essays have been longlisted for a C&R Press Publication Prize, and their poems were longlisted for the Palette Poetry Love & Eros Prize. Their work explores connection to place, deep ecology, trauma and lineage, absurdity and estrangement. They are particularly interested in hybrid genre writing.