Borealis

Aisha Sabatini Sloan was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She studied English literature at Carleton College and went on to earn 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 essay collections The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. With her father, she is the author of Captioning the Archives, a conversation through image and text. She is a recipient of the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Praise for BorealisWinner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual NonfictionWinner of the 2022 Jean Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction“There’s a push and pull to the movement of [Sabatini Sloan’s] ideas that engaged me completely. . . . Rigorous essays shake up memory, history, and what we consider the knowledge we possess.” —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer“Teems with satisfying complexity. . . . Sloan has that rare ability to convey the astonishment of an insight at the instant of its arrival.”—Lisa Hsiao Chen, The Rumpus“Expansive and spacious.”—Laura Sackton, BookRiot“​​The descriptions are surprising and funny, the musings on race in Alaska poignant, and the prose punchy, vulnerable, and surprising.”—Publishers Weekly“A meditative journey to Homer, Alaska. . . . This is stunning. Sloan’s prose is breathtaking as she explores the wilderness.”—Courtney Eathorne, Booklist“An extraordinary experience! A landscape has never felt so real to me, so like life.” —Eula Biss“As aurora to her titular borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan bends and flashes with belletristic dexterity and a quietly big-sticked insistence upon her own agency.”—Samiya Bashir