Matthew James Morris writes literary nonfiction: explorations and meditations, lookings out and lookings in, gathered and assembled shards of prose. He cares for geographies of the heart and land; for movement: sport, improvised lines, variegated histories; for solitude and stillness. He’s spent a good while in Arlington, Virginia, his hometown; in Charlottesville, two hours south; and in Tucson, Arizona, among the saguaros and palo verdes, the javelinas and hummingbirds.

He is the son of an African American father and a white mother, each of whom played D-1 college tennis; the proud brother of a Stanford-educated lawyer and puzzler and general adventurer; and a friend given to hideaways and resurfacings. Once, he and a friend slept in a hiker’s shelter atop the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight; once, he and the same friend hitched a ride far from home, only to find they’d grown up with the driver’s cousin; more than once, he thought he’d figured things out, but: a work in progress.

His book of linked essays, The Tilling, was (startlingly and beautifully) chosen by Wendy S. Walters for Seneca Review Books’ 2024 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and was released on December 10, near the end of his first semester in the creative writing Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri – Columbia, where he is the profoundly grateful recipient of a Gus T. Ridgel graduate fellowship.