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.