We are very pleased to welcome Matthew Morris to Skylark to discuss his new book, The Tilling, winner of the prestigious 2023 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.

“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.

Matthew Morris (he/him) is a mixed-race writer of creative nonfiction (his father African American, his mother white) born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Arlington, Virginia. His collection of essays, The Tilling, explores Black/white identity through the trope of the tragic mulatto. He hopes someday to write a literary biography of two ancestors: John Peyton Morris, a Methodist preacher and professor of Greek and math born into slavery, and Virginia Sorenson, a novelist of Mormon literature’s “lost generation.” For fun, Matthew plays league tennis, pickup basketball, and fingerstyle guitar. At Mizzou, he is a Ph.D. candidate in English and creative writing, a graduate instructor, and a proud recipient of a Gus T. Ridgel Fellowship.