Apr
4
10:00pm
The Craft of Blackness ft. Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Megan Giddings, & Courtney Faye Taylor (LIVESTREAM)
By CAAPP
Livestream of the in-person event featuring the brilliant Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Megan Giddings, & Courtney Faye Taylor in Creative Conversation
If you'd like to attend the in-person event at Heinz Memorial Chapel in Pittsburgh, please RSVP here.
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Aisha Sabatini Sloan 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. Of the forthcoming book, Maggie Nelson notes, “I’m so impressed by the critical lucidity of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit. Essay by essay, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes even sentence by sentence, Sloan roves, guided by a deliberate, intelligent, associative logic which feels somehow both loose and exact, at times exacting. The implicit and explicit argument of these essays is that there’s no way out but through—and maybe even no way out. So here we are, so lucky to have Sloan as our patient, wry, questing companion and guide.”
Sloan is also the author of The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press, 2013); Borealis (Copper Canyon, 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. About their creative partnership, Rachel Eliza Griffiths noted, “Together, they have formed a powerful reckoning of both power and wonder. Here, you will find both family and imagination suspended in a marvelous sequence of call and response as Lester Sloan and Aisha Sabatini Sloan bring us through a history that belongs to us too.”
Sloan is the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, among other places.
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.
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Megan Giddings is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. In Fall 2023, she’ll be the Picador Professor at Leipzig University. Her novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in 2020. It was one of New York Magazine’s 10 best books of 2020, one of NPR’s best books of 2020, a Michigan Notable book for 2021, was a nominee for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for a 2020 LA Times Book Prize in The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction category. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly (Amistad 2022), was named one of The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2022, one of Vulture’s Best Fantasy books of 2022, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work has received support from the Barbara Deming Foundation and Hedgebrook.
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Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer, visual artist, and the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths as the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Concentrate was awarded the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was named a finalist for the NAACP Image Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award. The collection has been featured in Publishers Weekly, Essence Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and named among the “Best Poetry of the Last Year” by Ms. Magazine.
Courtney earned her BA from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize and has received fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Cave Canem. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Charlotte Street Foundation and The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art online. Her writing can be found in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere.
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