Content Tagged ‘Trespass’

In Seven Questions, we interview writers, editors, designers, and others in publishing. Today, we speak with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, a writer, curator, and artist. She joins us in the UNCW Department of Creative Writing this semester as a visiting professor of creative nonfiction.

Sabatini Sloan writes on race and current events, interweaving personal experience with analysis of art and pop culture. Maggie Nelson selected her second essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, for the 1913 Open Prose Contest, and Graywolf Press recently released it in a revised edition. She has also won the CLMP Firecracker Award and the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction and the Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction for her essay “Borealis.” Sabatini Sloan is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in creative writing, and her work has earned recognition in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the Paris Review, and Guernica, among many other places. Her essay “D Is for the Dance of the Hours,” originally published in Ecotone, is anthologized in Lookout Books’ Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism. 

Lookout staffer Laurie Clark interviewed Aisha Sabatini Sloan in spring 2024.

What do you look forward to experiencing while at UNC Wilmington? 

Seeing everyone I’m in class with who are now like celebrities to me. Now that it’s spring, I’m excited to look at what people are growing, especially after hearing everyone in my class talk about their gardening adventures. Being in a warm place. The beach! 

You grew up in Los Angeles, though you have family roots in Detroit, where you’ve also spent significant time over the years. How have these two different landscapes shaped your voice as a writer?  

Detroit has a mythological dimension for me because it is where I encountered all of my most recently departed ancestors and where my parents met and had their artistic awakenings. My parents met at the public library in the late sixties. All of their friends were these children of the Great Migration or of immigrants who were rejecting war and charting a path into a larger world. Choreographers and musicians and Franciscans. The physicality of Detroit is so symphonic and grandiose, Diego Court at the DIA, the opera house—there is all this very old–world architecture. And my family is full of vivid storytellers. Whereas Los Angeles was all about possibility and newness. A futuristic place with beaches and skyscrapers and Hollywood and the cityscape is like holographic images floating in space. Being away from my family made me especially curious about it, which is where my writing started with this attempt to engage in this larger family myth-making endeavor. And even being in LA made me feel like I was far away from everything while also being in the center of something. My dad always talks about seeing things through a prism, and LA functioned a bit like that; it became this lens, a place through which I saw other places. And my writing has that tendency to look through things at other things and be nowhere and everywhere.  

In our newest series, The Future of Publishing, we’re excited to reintroduce alumni of UNCW’s publishing program, including former Ecotone and Lookout staffers, who have gone on to careers in the industry. To help celebrate the launch of Lookout’s redesigned website, we begin with a profile of Hub City’s Meg Reid.

Lookout Books is more than a haven for books that matter; it’s a teaching press under the auspices of the Publishing Laboratory at UNCW, making it also a haven for apprentice editors and publishers. The imprint and its sister magazine, Ecotone, offer students hands-on opportunities to gain experience in editing, marketing, publicity, design, and everything in between. Meg Reid, Director of Hub City Press in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was among the first class of students to support the work of the newly founded imprint.

The Lookout publishing practicum, taught by publisher Emily Smith, “completely prepared her for working for a small press,” Reid says, “which involves balancing a lot of plates and wearing a lot of hats.” While working for the press, she drafted grants, planned author readings and book tours, and wrote design briefs for artists.

“I always liked that we were called on to talk about the books in public often. I learned how to summarize a book, while communicating its important themes and resonances—a skill I use often now, pitching reps and booksellers,” Reid notes.

As part of her graduate work in writing and publishing, Reid enrolled in the Lookout practicum class multiple semesters and helped publish three titles: Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, Steve Almond’s God Bless America, and John Rybicki’s When All the World Is Old. She found it exhilarating to help build the imprint. “Edith’s book was a strike of lightning—we were brand new and suddenly in a national spotlight. I still regularly gift people Binocular Vision—to my mind, it’s the gold standard of short story collections.”

As director of Hub City Press, where she has worked since 2013, Reid now publishes between five to seven books a year in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She oversees the publishing program and helps realize Hub City’s mission to find and advocate for extraordinary voices from the American south.

“I always liked that we were called on to talk about the books in public often. I learned how to summarize a book, while communicating its important themes and resonances—a skill I use often now, pitching reps and booksellers,” Reid notes.

Who’s finished packing for AWP? This time next week we’ll be landing in Tampa, brushing off our spring-break best, and unpacking lots of goodies for the Lookout Books/Ecotone bookfair booth! Visit us at Tables 1302 & 1304, and join the UNCW faculty and Lookout/Ecotone staff for panels and book signings.

Thursday

Readiness: Prose Poems by Mark Cox, Booksigning.
Press 53, Bookfair Table 444
Thursday, March 8, 2018
3:00 p.m.

The Gatekeepers: Behind the Scenes of Literary Agencies. (Michelle Brower, Lucy Carson, Allison Hunter, Erin Harris, Beth Staples) The world of literary agents can seem murky and impenetrable to authors beginning the publishing process, but it doesn’t have to be that way! This panel will focus on candidly exploring how authors and agents actually find each other in the real world. What do agents do, why do they do it, and what does it take to get their attention? With an extended question and answer session, writers will have the opportunity to ask our panel of actively acquiring agents their most burning questions.
Room 24, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Friday

Reading from Flash Nonfiction Funny. (Tom Hazuka, Wendy Brenner, Michael   Martone, Sandra Gail Lambert, Suzanne Strempek Shea) Flash Nonfiction Funny, edited by Tom Hazuka and Dinty W. Moore and published in 2018, provides a unique perspective on the flash genre: working within a 750-word limit, each of these nonfiction pieces is designed to make readers laugh. Satire, burlesque, farce, slapstick—all of it true, told in just 1–3 pages. The panelists will read their own stories from the book, as well as favorite pieces by other authors from the anthology.
Room 12, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
10:30 am to 11:45 am

“Things We Do When No One Is Watching” by Philip Gerard, Booksigning.
New Letters BkMk Pres, Bookfair Table 1048
Friday, March 9, 2018
1 p.m.

Vassar Miller Poetry Prize 25th Anniversary Reading. (Caki Wilkinson, Alison Stine, James Najarian, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Jordan Windholz) The Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, founded at the University of North Texas in 1993, honors Texas poet, writer, and disability rights advocate Vassar Miller (1924–1998). To commemorate the prize’s 25th anniversary, the writers of winning manuscripts will read from their collections, showcasing the formal and geographic variety of poetry published in the series. The reading will be followed by a Q&A.
Florida Salon, 1, 2, & 3, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.

The Teaching Press: Bringing Professional Literary Publishing into the Classroom. (Holms Troelstrup, Steve Halle, Deanna Baringer, Ross Tangedal, Beth Staples) Lookout Books at UNC–Wilmington, PRESS 254 at Illinois State University, BatCat Press at Lincoln Park Performing Arts in Pennsylvania, and Cornerstone Press at UW–Stevens Point utilize literary presses as teaching tools for graduate, undergraduate, and secondary students, emphasizing hands-on experience in literary publishing. Panelists detail important practical and curricular concerns in establishing and maintaining a teaching press, as well as the local and national impact of their work.
Room 17, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

A Woman’s Place: Ecotone Essayists Expand the Boundaries of Place-Based Writing. (Belle Boggs, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Shuchi Saraswat, Aisha Sabatini Sloan) Contributors to a new anthology from Ecotone and Lookout Books discuss how we can continue to broaden the traditional boundaries of place-based writing to make room for more complexity: explorations of body, sexuality, gender, and race. Joined by their editor, these authors consider how women’s unique experiences and histories make them artful observers of the natural world. They will read from their essays and talk about approaches to intersectionality in the field of environmental writing.
Florida Salon 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

Saturday

“Ornament” by Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Booksigning.
University of North Texas Press, Bookfair Table 1512
Saturday, March 10, 2018
11:00 a.m.