Meet Erica N. Cardwell

Erica N. Cardwell is the author of Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art (Feminist Press, 2024) which was chosen by Electric Literature as the Best Nonfiction of 2024, and as a finalist for a 2025 Lambda Literary award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography. Her essay, “If Willarena Were an Artist” was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize by World Literature Today. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a New York State Council for Arts, Grant for Artists. Her writing has appeared in ARTS.BLACK, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Public Journal, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. Erica has written exhibition and catalogue essays for artists such as Crystal Z. Campbell, Rico Gatson, Samantha Box, Chitra Ganesh, and Sandra Brewster. 

An advocate for equitable and community rooted labor practices, her research in arts management primarily centers Black feminist, queer, matrilineal and cooperative models. Prior to her work in Toronto, Erica taught at various institutions: The New School/Civic Engagement and Social Justice, Parsons School of Design, Barnard College, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY. Erica is a member of the International Art Critics Association (AICA), the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), the Modern Language Association, and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). She is currently Manuscript co-editor of Radical Teacher Journal.