By Neil Armstrong

Since April, Blackhurst Cultural Centre has been presenting a monthly program, The Art of Writing Techniques, supported by the Chawkers Foundation, for emerging writers interested in different genres of writing.

On November 14, Erica N. Cardwell,author, Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art)and Matthew R. Morris,author of Black Boys Like Me: Confrontations with Race, Identity, and Belonging will be the featured writers.

Cardwell, an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn and Toronto. 

She received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first book, Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art was published by The Feminist Press in March this year. 

The book is described as “a dazzling hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art.”

At the age of twenty-one, Cardwell finds herself in New York City, reeling from the loss of her mother and numb to the world around her.

“She turns inward instead, reading books and composing poetry, eventually falling into the work of artists such as Blondell Cummings, Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O’Grady, and Kara Walker. Through them, she communes with her mother’s spirit and legacy and finds new ways to interrogate her writing and identity.

“Wrong Is Not My Name weaves together autobiography, criticism, and theory, and considers how Black women create alternative, queer, and “hysterical” lives through visual culture and performance…Pioneering and inquisitive, Wrong Is Not My Name celebrates Black womanhood, and illuminates the ways in which art and storytelling reside at the core of being human,” notes the description.

Cardwell is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a New York State Council for Arts, Grant for Artists. She considers the consciousness and imaginations of people of color as a tool for social, spiritual, and collective movement. 

Her writing has appeared in ARTS. BLACK, Artsy, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, CULTURED, and other publications. Most recently, her writing is included in the anthology Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism.  

Matthew R. Morris is an educator and writer, born and raised in Toronto. His writing focuses on the intersection of race, Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and education.

He currently teaches middle school in Toronto and believes that the more credentials behind his name only equate to the more tattoos down his forearms.

Morris holds a Master of Arts from the University of Toronto and his first book, Black Boys Like Me, was published in January.

“What does it mean to be a young Black man with an immigrant father and a white mother, teaching in a school system that historically has held an exclusionary definition of success?

“In eight illuminating essays, Matthew R. Morris grapples with this question, and others related to identity and perception. After graduating high school in Scarborough, Morris spent four years in the U.S. on multiple football scholarships and, having spent that time in the States experiencing “the Mecca of hip-hop and Black culture,” returned home with a newfound perspective,” notes a description of the book.

It says Morris explores the tension between his consumption of Black culture as a child, his teenage performances of the ideas and values of the culture that often betrayed his identity, and the ways society and the people guiding him—his parents, coaches, and teachers—received those performances. “What emerges is a painful journey toward transcending performance altogether, toward true knowledge of the self.”

Morris has written with TVO, Huffington Post, ETFO’s “The Voice” magazine, and Education Canada magazine. His TEDx talk, “The Fresh Prince Syndrome,” speaks to the perils and promises urban Black male students are presented with in public schooling in today’s ever evolving world.

The Art of Writing Techniques session focused on writing a memoir will be held on November 14, 6:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. at Blackhurst Cultural Centre, 777 Bathurst St., Toronto.

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