Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Writer, Curator, Artist
Lambda Literary Award

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  • An Evening with Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Biography

“Aisha Sabatini Sloan manages to produce a collection of essays that are at once innovative, inspiring, sobering, and absolutely terrifying while daring every other essayist in the country to catch up.” —Kiese Laymon

“Through dexterous collaging of art, literature, correspondence, music, overheards, skylight colors, and intellectual flexes set against a prison’s visiting-room wall, Sabatini Sloan’s writing resists bindings of genre or collective propinquity.” —Samiya Bashir

Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes through the fractured lens of art, film, television, and pop culture. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Sloan is the author of Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (Graywolf, 2024), a collection of essays – focusing on the period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic – rooted in the supposition that there is an intrinsic relationship between the way we conceptualize darkness and our collective opportunity for awakening. Of the forthcoming book, Maggie Nelson notes, “I’m so impressed by the critical lucidity of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. Essay by essay, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes even sentence by sentence, Sloan roves, guided by a deliberate, intelligent, associative logic which feels somehow both loose and exact, at times exacting. The implicit and explicit argument of these essays is that there’s no way out but through—and maybe even no way out. So here we are, so lucky to have Sloan as our patient, wry, questing companion and guide.”

Sloan is also the author of The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press, 2013); Borealis (Copper Canyon, 2021), winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction, the 2022 Jean Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction; and Captioning the Archives (McSweeney‘s, 2021), a collaborative conversation in text and photo between Sloan and her father. About their creative partnership, Rachel Eliza Griffiths noted, “Together, they have formed a powerful reckoning of both power and wonder. Here, you will find both family and imagination suspended in a marvelous sequence of call and response as Lester Sloan and Aisha Sabatini Sloan bring us through a history that belongs to us too.”

Sloan is the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, among other places.

She earned an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Short Bio

Aisha Sabatini Sloan was born and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA in English from Carleton College, an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona.  She is the author of The Fluency of Light, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Borealis, and Captioning the Archives. She is the winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award, the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, the Jean Córdova prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, among other places. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.

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