Aisha Sabatini Sloan Reading
310 Pillsbury Dr SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
About the event
The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series presents Aisha Sabatini Sloan, who 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.
Register for this free event (registrants will be checked in by name). Presented by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email Terri Sutton at [email protected] or call 612-626-1528.
About the speaker
Sloan is also the author of The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press, 2013); Borealis (Coffee House Press, 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.
Sloan is the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a 2025 Whiting Award. The judges for the Whiting Award noted her as a writer whose collection of cultural criticism “dazzles with startling connections between the personal and the collective. This is the haunting testimony of one who feels herself a born trespasser. Ever alert but fearless, she makes spaces her own.” Her essays can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, Paris Review, New York Times, Gulf Coast, and Yale Review, among other publications.
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.