Aisha Sabatini Sloan – författare

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of the best lyric essays published in the last several years by prominent and emerging writers. Editors Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold situate this anthology within the ongoing work of resistance—to genre convention, literary tradition, and the confines of dominant-culture spaces. As sites of resistance, these essays are diverse and include investigations into deeply personal and political topics such as queer and trans identity, the American BIPOC experience, reproductive justice, belonging, grief, and more.The lyric essay is always surprising; it is bold, unbound, and free. This collection highlights the lyric essay's natural capacity for representation and resistance and celebrates the form as a subversive genre that offers a mode of expression for marginalized voices. The Lyric Essay as Resistance features contemporary work by essayists including Melissa Febos, Wendy S. Walters, Torrey Peters, Jenny Boully, Crystal Wilkinson, Elissa Washuta, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and many more. Their work demonstrates the power of the lyric essay to bring about change, both on the page and in our communities.

Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space—Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom.Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.