writer. curator. artist.

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

bio

Aisha writes about swimming pools, road trips, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s obsession with Gray’s Anatomy, glaciers, and the anxiety of seeking chiropractic treatment. She writes through the fractured lens of art, film, tv, and pop culture. Her family believes in ghosts and the tv show Succession made her want to re-read the works of Shakespeare. She is the recipient of a 2017 CLMP Firecracker award, the 1913 Book Prize, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, a 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, and the 2022 Jean Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.

portrait by Marly Beyer

on Borealis:

“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. ‘I forget what’s a thing to say,’ she writes, even as her unique geometries of syntax, set against the book’s glacial blocks of white space, elicit revelatory ways not just to say a thing but to see it. Through dexterous collaging of art, literature, correspondence, music, overheards, skylight colors, and intellectual flexes set against a prison’s visiting-room wall, Borealis resists bindings of genre or collective propinquity. Instead, Sabatini Sloan’s conversational architectures of space illuminate landscape as internal experience whose vastness, she finds, forces her to become her own friend.” 

—Samiya Bashir

books

Essays

& Interviews

  • An essay on The Paris Review

  • An essay about Rodney King and David Hockney on Guernica.

  • An essay about painting, architecture, and revolt in The Yale Review.

  • National Magazine Award winning column on The Paris Review

  • An essay by Aisha about her father in The New York Times

  • A father/daughter interview on Harpers Bazaar

  • A photo-essay on Vanity Fair

  • An essay on The Paris Review.

  • An interview with Ruth Curry of Emily Books on Autostraddle.

  • A book review on Tarpaulin Sky.

  • A book review on the Tin House Open Bar Blog.

  • A book review on Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World for Autostraddle.

  • A Conversation with Gabrielle Civil on The Rumpus.

The Lester Essays

Is it a podcast? A documentary? A pizza pie? Coming soon…