Feminist Giant & The Strand Present Erica Cardwell + Mona Eltahawy

This event is co-presented with Feminist Giant. For more information, please visit their website at www.feministgiant.com. All donation ticket proceeds will go to Feminist Giant.

Join us for an in-person event with writer and educator Erica Cardwell for a discussion of her new book Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art. Joining Erica in conversation is author and founder of Feminist Giant Mona Eltahawy. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

This event is FREE to attend.

Can’t make the event?  

STRAND IN-PERSON EVENT COVID-19 POLICY:

Masks and vaccination checks are not required for entry.* Attendees are welcome to wear a mask if they choose. If you do not have a mask and would like one, The Strand will provide masks at the door.

*Please note this is subject to change any time before or during the event per the author’s request.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by April 18th to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact

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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, Erica 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. In poetic, interdisciplinary essays—combining analytical and lyrical stream-of-consciousness—Cardwell examines archetypes such as the lascivious Jezebel, the caretaking Mammy, and the elusive Sapphire to formulate new and inventive ways to write about art.

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.

Feminist Giant is a free, reader-supported newsletter that provides weekly essays by Mona Eltahawy and bi-weekly Global Roundups of feminist resistance curated by contributor Samiha Hossain.

Erica N. Cardwell is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn and Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in ARTS. BLACK, Art in America, frieze, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Kenyon Review, and other publications. She is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Mona Eltahawy is founder and editor-in-chief of the newsletter FEMINIST GIANT. She is a public speaker on global feminism and is the author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolu­tion (2015), which targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa, and The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (2019), which took her disruption to patriarchy worldwide.

Event Venue

Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States