Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Photo by Hanna Ensor
Bio
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an essayist and multimedia artist. She is the author of two essay collections, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. The latter was nominated for an Iowa Essay Prize, and won the 1913 Press Open Prose book contest as well as the CLMP Firecracker award for nonfiction. Her book-length essay, Borealis, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her essays have been widely anthologized, and appear in publications such as the Offing, Guernica, the Paris Review, and Obsidian. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan Writers’ Program.
At my writing desk, I sit underneath several framed images: the found photograph of a girl who does not want her picture taken, a postcard of an erupting Icelandic volcano, a house in winter, a film poster, a pencil-drawn osprey, a mask that I purchased at a market in Cape Town, and the broadside of a poem printed on top of the image of cut stone in a forest landscape. They hover like a message from my past self that I’ve yet to decode. Over the last few years, I have been catching up, sending emails, forgetting to send emails, waking up in the middle of the night to write to do lists. What I haven’t done in what seems like forever is make the space to wonder what the little girl might have to say to the erupting volcano. A life-transforming fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts offers just that: permission to pause and look up. I am enormously grateful.