In addition to being a haven for books that matter, Lookout is also a teaching press, offering apprenticeships to students enrolled in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s BFA and MFA publishing certificate programs. But the education we provide extends beyond our students—we pride ourselves on empowering our authors, too.  

The opacity of the publishing industry has long been a barrier to those trying to break into the industry. This is why education and transparency have been a part of Lookout’s mission since its founding in 2009. In that spirit, we want to use this month’s blog post to share how we approach acquiring a new manuscript. *Hint—we’re looking! 

As a boutique press, Lookout publishes one book a year. This means that when we acquire a manuscript, we spend a lot of time with it, so it’s important that the book is a good fit for our team.  

But what makes a book a good fit for Lookout? In general, we search for books that might otherwise be overlooked by traditional publishing, whether that means the work of emerging writers, historically underrepresented voices, or more experimental or overlooked works by established writers.  

There are also logistical factors that guide our search. For example, we publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and each season, we rotate which genre we’ll publish next. Our most recent release, A Love Tap by Bernardo Wade is a debut collection of poetry. The book prior, Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, was an anthology that included both nonfiction and poetry. This means, we are currently looking to acquire a work of fiction for our next title; however, we are always open to agented submissions in any genre, with an eye toward publishing works in subsequent seasons.  

So how do we go about finding these books?Typically, the Lookout publishing practicum is made up of a mix of undergraduate and graduate students who serve as scouts for the imprint. So, in addition to agented submissions which are sent and responded to by our editor, KaToya Ellis Fleming, and our publisher, Emily Smith, on a rolling basis, our staff often searches for potential authors in our favorite literary magazines. This semester, for example, staff have searched for potential authors in lit mags like Ecotone, Electric Literature, and Foglifter, or among contest finalists for the Granum Prize and the Pen America Emerging Voices Fellowship, just to name a few.  

So, what does this mean for an author hoping to get discovered? Well, it means that publishing often and entering contests—even if you don’t win—can help your chances of being discovered. Sometimes, if a writer seems particularly promising, our editor may reach out to the writer (or their agent if they have one) directly to see if they’ve got a full-length manuscript in progress that they’d like Lookout to consider. So, if you have a website, be sure to include your publication history. And if you don’t have a website yet (and even if you do!), it’s helpful to keep your social media up to date with your publications and projects you may be working on.  

Each week during acquisitions, members of our student staff present exciting new authors and their works to our practicum (which functions as an internship) for the team to review and discuss. According to Lookout’s editor (and our professor) KaToya Ellis Fleming, we should be looking for “…writers who fit with our mission and align with our editorial ethos.” But each staff member’s personal preferences are different and as such, acquisitions can be a subjective process. This semester’s Lookout staffers have at turns presented to the class, stories that they found “vivid, engaging, and memorable”, “deliciously weird”, or which had “complex characters navigating unexpected situations.” And we had a blast discovering so much talent, so many new favorite writers. Who knows…we may have found our next title this semester! And we can’t wait to share it with you.  

For more information on Lookout Books, our staff, and our recent titles, make sure to check out our Instagram at @lookoutbooksuncw. 

Thank you to Lookout staffer Madison McCormack for your work on this blog post!  

In Lookout‘s blog series The Future of Publishing, we spotlight alums of UNCW’s publishing program, including former practicum members, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of Morissa Young (MFA ‘24), a former Lookout staffer who also received the program’s certificate in publishing.  

As an editor at Milkweed Editions, Morissa handles the production of nearly two-thirds of the books on Milkweed’s list. She manages around fifteen to twenty manuscripts at a time, ensuring the projects stay on schedule at each stage of the publishing process, planning designs, assigning copyeditors, and taking care of large-scale developmental edits and more complicated copyedits. She is currently working with books that will be published as far out as spring 2027, including books for Multiverse, a series of writing by “neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled writers,” curated by poet Chris Martin. One of Morissa’s first books in this series, blush / river / fox by Anna Nygren, came out in February. She says that much of what she learned from her class on translation with Malena Mörling at UNCW directly informed her copyediting work on the book: “It’s kind of existing in a space between English and Swedish. There are words that are not quite Swedish, not quite English. It’s so inventive.”  

Morissa came to UNCW with the goal of entering the publishing industry.  

“I tried getting a bunch of different publishing jobs and couldn’t land one because of the whole ‘you don’t have experience’ thing,” she says. “I knew that I was good at this, but I just needed people to take a chance on me. So, I began my plotting, which involved going to grad school.”  

She had previously worked as an editor, proofreader, and intern with entities such as Dzanc Books, McIntosh and Otis, and Kinzer Projects. At UNCW, she tailored her classwork and her extracurriculars toward her goal of becoming an editor, working with Lookout Books and designing spreads for its sister literary magazine Ecotone as a graduate teaching assistant in the Publishing Laboratory. “I hardcore manifested this job for seven years,” she says, “With Lookout, I told Emily Smith what my goals were because I knew that I wanted to work in editorial, so I was able to really curate my experience there to suit my goals pretty perfectly. I talked a lot about it in my interview.”  

In addition to her role at Milkweed, Morissa, along with fellow Pub Lab alum Maggie Boyd Hare, founded literary magazine Strange Hymnal. The journal—which, as its name suggests, actively seeks out the strange—received over a thousand submissions in its first year and launched its first issue in spring of 2025.  

“Working in the Pub Lab highlighted how much I love the tactile experience of bookmaking, but we didn’t really have the budget to form a print magazine. So, we wanted to make Strange Hymnal something that is digital on purpose. We don’t want it to look like it should be a print mag. We want it to be a fully online space, yet with a lot of handmade elements.”  

This has certainly paid off, as Strange Hymnal was recently nominated for Beautiful Design in Chill Subs’ Annual Best Lit Mag Awards. “We get so many people saying, like, ‘this is exactly the type of thing I was looking for.’  It’s so special that it’s resonating with so many people.”  

Morissa had one main piece of advice for people looking to get into the publishing industry: make your own opportunities. Whether that’s sending cold emails, reaching out to lit mags, or interning with a letterpress, you have to be willing to make opportunities happen. She adds that you have to really be passionate about publishing: “It’s way too competitive and doesn’t pay well enough for you to decide to pursue it if you don’t actually love it.”   

Thank you to Lookout staffer Jessica Jones for her contributions to this profile. 

Today in Seven Questions, we’re excited to catch up with Clare Beams, award-winning author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, whose newest story, “Snowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?” appears in Ecotone’s recent Moon Issue. 

Clare Beams’s latest novel, The Garden (Doubleday, 2024), was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Vanity Fair Best Book of 2024, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2024, among other awards. Her novel The Illness Lesson (Doubleday, 2020) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle and a best book of February by Time, O Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, 2016), won the Bard Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Story Prize, and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, Conjunctions, The Common, Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and has earned special mention in The Pushcart Prize and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters and teaches in the Randolph MFA program.

Lookout Graduate Publishing Assistant Caroline Beuley interviewed Clare Beams.

Let’s start with your story “Snowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?” which was just published in Ecotone’s moon issue. What inspired the story and what was your process for writing and editing it, both on your own, and with Ecotone?

I have a longstanding obsession with fairy tales. I had a Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature as a kid that formed some of the bedrock of my imagination, both the stories and the pictures, and I returned to “Snow-white and Rose-red” and its illustrations—those two matching-but-opposite girls—often. In parenthood I’ve become fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about our children, and what purposes those stories serve for us and for them, and what their possible costs might be. That’s the swirl of thinking and feeling and images that started me writing.

My process with this story was similar to my process with most of my work, and it looks a lot like the process George Saunders describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: a setting-down of bare bones and then endless, playful re-readings and adjustments and additions and subtractions until I begin to feel I can glimpse something that pleases me, something I couldn’t ever have planned. The editing process with Ecotone was a delight, as I knew it would be: the editors’ incredibly careful, generous, insightful readings helped me take this one the last bit of the way over the finish line.

The otherworldly and the fantastic have remained a consistent thread through We Show What We Have Learned, “Snowy-White, Rosy-red, Will You?,” and your latest novel, The Garden. What role do fantasy and strangeness play in your writing? What draws you to it?

I might go almost as far as to say that strangeness is my writing’s lifeblood—it seems key, for me, to making my work live on the page. I write some work that departs radically from realism and some that’s just a little pulled, a little stretched, but there’s always an element that’s (at least for me) not quite real. I think a lot about why this might be, and I think it’s that for me, strangeness of this kind is linked to creative risk and play—to the sense that I’m experimenting—and that feeling is one I really need when I’m writing.

You’ve now published two novels with Doubleday, a story collection with Lookout, and countless stories with established literary magazines, including Ecotone. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned through these different experiences?

I think the most important lesson I’ve learned is that while it’s a privilege and an honor to have one’s work out in the world—and it is!—my favorite part of the process comes before that, when I’m playing with what I’m making, seeing what I can discover and what it is I might have to say. I’m more and more convinced, the longer I do this, that the making-the-work part is the real reason to keep going. (Though connecting with readers will always give me a heart-overflowing feeling that I’m lucky to get to experience in this world.)

What would you say are some of the benefits of publishing with an independent press?

I still feel so fortunate to have published my first book with Lookout, where I had the whole team’s entire focus for my entire publication year. The creativity and ingenuity and energy at work on my book’s behalf were all astounding. The amount of personal attention my story collection and I received from the brilliant people at Lookout, especially Emily Smith and Beth Staples, still makes me teary with gratitude.

What would you say are some of the benefits of publishing with a Big Five house?

I’ve had a marvelous experience at Doubleday, where I adore my editor, Lee Boudreaux, beyond all measure. She’s a genius and I’m so lucky to have had her mind in the worlds of my novels with me. I’ll also say that a Big Five tends to have pretty massive sales and marketing reach, even if those resources have to serve a lot of books. (There’s also the fact that a Big Five can pay a writer enough to buy that writer meaningful amounts of writing time, depending on circumstances, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.)

What drew you to Ecotone for “Snowy-White, Rosy-red, Will you?”?

Because I’ve published in Ecotone before and know and love the team there, both through that previous publication and through working with Lookout for my story collection, I knew this story of my heart would receive the careful, thoughtful editing and attention I wanted it to receive. I’m beyond thrilled.

What advice would you offer a writer just beginning to seek publication, either searching for a first agent or sending work to magazines?

I think the best advice I have is to cultivate a blend of patience and persistence—the happiest writers I know have managed a balance of thick skin and receptivity/willingness to rethink when necessary. I would also add that the best part of all this is really and truly the part you’re doing already, the playing, the making. Keep loving that, and keep doing it, and the rest will happen, though none of us can control exactly how or when.

With the release of Bernardo Wade’s A Love Tap this week, the Lookout team has been reflecting on how each book project affords us new opportunities to translate words on the page into artful and lasting conversations.

For us, promotional kits not only help generate excitement for a forthcoming book, but they also contextualize and enlarge the discussion around it. They include, of course, early reading copies and details about the book, but we always try to create fun items to remind recipients how deeply we invest in each author and title. Over the past few semesters, students in UNCW’s MFA and BFA publishing programs have worked with book practicum instructor and publisher Emily Smith to curate A Love Tap promotions with thoughtfulness and care. 

To support A Love Tap, Lookout staff designed handmade bookmarks to accompany each galley. Beaded in Mardi Gras colors, the bookmark is adorned with a hand-illustrated acrylic fox charm, drawing inspiration from Wade’s poems and nodding to the beautiful custom pendants that often decorate the necklaces of Mardi Gras krewes.   

BFA alumna Nitya Budamagunta, who came up with the idea of the fox charm when taking the spring 2025 Lookout class, explains that landing on the fox was, in large part, a collaborative process among staff in the practicum. Possibilities for the charm included resonant images from the book: a crow inspired by “Another (Damn) Crow Poem,” an unlit match, and a silhouette honoring Lucille Clifton—one of Wade’s literary influences—but the team ultimately landed on the fox, an image that recurs in the poems “dear fox” and “the coming of fox.” Bookending the collection, the poems reflect on the speaker’s relationships with family.    

“Though Wade writes about all kinds of relationships—to New Orleans, to lovers and friends, to his mother—it’s his father he most returns to,” Ross Wade writes in his foreword to A Love Tap, “probably because it’s the most vexing of those relationships.” Gay says that “dear fox” and “the coming of fox” are the poems he returns to most. “The stories, what we’ve been told, what we’ve inherited, what we’ve been given, are illuminated, and transformed, by what is unknowable. In these cases, visitation by foxes who are, or at least invoke, the poet’s father and his grandmother. These poems shimmer in strange and yearning light. It’s beautiful and apt that Wade’s fox poems are after Lucille Clifton’s—of course they are—for who better to help us attend to the unknowable. To help us regard what we cannot understand. Which maybe is why we come to poems in the first place. And maybe why poetry comes to us.”   

As Nitya began designing, she first sought stock imagery of a fox but quickly realized that none captured the style and tone of Wade’s poems. The fox in his poems is unknowable, fleeting, while the clip art she found felt overly cute. She wanted the charm to evoke Mardi Gras, but she also needed to avoid cliché. The resulting charm draws inspiration from the detailed style of Mardi Gras masks, incorporating the fleur-de-lis and a few feathers in purple, green, and gold.  

Nitya’s personal history as an artist also inspired the process and materials. She’s been making jewelry since she was twelve, and over time, has experimented a lot. “Among my favorite things are bookmarks made out of fishing line and beads,” she says. “The string becomes an invisible marker inside the pages.” Although we ultimately opted for ribbon instead of fishing line, Nitya notes, “I love how it pops with the purple and green beads!” 

At the heart of the design is an image from “Faith or another way of being,” the opening poem in A Love Tap. In it, Wade writes of “a rosary strung together with Mardi Gras beads.” Nitya says, “I love how this line builds the initial sense of place in the collection.” It introduces Wade’s concerns and obsessions. It was a pivotal image the team kept coming back to as we brainstormed ideas for this project. “This bookmark is neither a rosary nor is it a representation of the festival, but I hope that readers continue to use the bookmark long after finishing the book,” she says, “thinking of A Love Tap along the way.”  

Stay tuned to our social media for ways that you could win your own fox charm bookmark!  We hope that you’ll order a copy of A Love Tap from us, or pick one up from your favorite bookshop. And if you’d like to be added to our media list for future ARC mailings, please reach out directly to Publisher Emily Smith. 

In our series The Future of Publishing, we reintroduce alumni of UNCW’s publishing programs, including former Lookout practicum members, who have gone on to careers in the industry. We continue our series with a profile of BFA certificate in publishing alumna Lauran Jones. 

An acquisitions editorial assistant at Bloomsbury, Lauran works in academic publishing, focusing on philosophy and classics. The first thing she does when she steps in the office each morning is check her email, an essential task to stay on top of her wide-reaching schedule. “I’m still learning the ropes,” she says. “There’s a lot of training involved, especially since Rowman & Littlefield, where I started in 2024, was acquired by Bloomsbury.” 

A major part of Lauran’s job is preparing accepted manuscripts for production. That means ensuring all permissions are cleared—especially for epigraphs or work previously published in journals—resolving lingering comments or highlights in the text, and polishing final details before handing it off to production. On a good week, she can get through about three manuscripts. 

Lauran’s workload includes everything from writing marketing copy and soliciting endorsements from scholars to drafting Library of Congress forms. “Acquisitions folks do more of the paperwork now,” she explains, “so I’ve had to learn a lot of new skills quickly.” 

About 20 percent of Lauran’s time is spent acquiring new titles. The rest she devotes to project management and author communication, providing vital support during each stage of the publishing process. During “commissioning week,” she reaches out to current authors to see if they have more ideas in the pipeline. She also keeps an eye out for standout articles in journals like Analytic Philosophy, and she reviews the unsolicited proposals that land in her inbox. 

Lauran then forwards proposals to the acquisitions editor. If a proposal advances, Lauran helps secure peer reviewers with relevant expertise, including scholars “with a wide range of perspectives,” she says, “especially voices that aren’t always centered in academia.” Diversity matters deeply to her. 

Publishing has been Lauran’s dream since she joined her high school’s literary club. “I fell in love with it on day one,” she says. As a student at UNCW, she went on to found SeaBreeze: A Literary Diaspora through Upperman African American Cultural Center and served as the youngest editor in the history of the student-run literary magazine Atlantis.

“I’ve always loved to read,” she says, “but I didn’t always see people who looked like me, or loved like me, on the page. That’s what pulled me into publishing. I want to help change that.” 

Lauran joined the Lookout Books publishing practicum in her last semester, as the press was finalizing its forthcoming anthology Bigger Than Bravery, edited by the late Valerie Boyd. “Working on Bigger Than Bravery showed me how beautiful and necessary these voices are. We were equals, and as the only Black person on the team, I really felt seen.” She contributed to the marketing campaign and cover design, and even curated the book’s playlist.

“Lookout taught me how publishing works from pitch to publication,” she says. “It gave me confidence that I could go wherever the job took me.”  

Beyond Lookout, she credits courses including Introduction to Book Publishing, Bookbuilding, and Sayantani Dasgupta’s Diversity in Publishing class as providing a strong foundation, especially when it came to understanding the lifecycle of a book. “Sayantani’s class really opened my world view,” Lauran notes. 

After completing her BFA, Lauran went on to earn a Master of Publishing from George Washington University, then spent a year and a half coaching swim lessons before landing her first full-time publishing job. “It takes a while,” she says. “Don’t get discouraged if you don’t land something right out of college,” she advises job seekers. She found her position at Bloomsbury through GW’s newsletter and says she got the job by being herself in the interview. “My now-boss could tell I was passionate and genuine.” 

After a four-year break, Lauran started writing again in late 2024. “It’s easy to get discouraged, but I’ve learned that even a sentence counts. You just have to pick the pen back up.” To emerging writers, she offers this practical encouragement: “Make a graveyard file. Kill your darlings, but know they’re not gone forever. And trust your editor! It’s okay to take a second to process all the red ink, but remember: they’re trying to help you get your work out into the world.” 

Currently, Lauran is excited about two things: The novel she’s writing (“Teaser—it’s about mermaids!”) and a series of titles she shepherded through production, including favorites Critical Mixed Race Philosophy, Why Suicide is Amoral, and Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights. “All three authors are incredible women,” she says, “and the work they’re doing is so important. There’s a lot of room for diversity in philosophy, and I’m happy to be a part of that shift.” She’s also set a goal for herself: to publish her own book by the time she turns thirty. But she knows she’s already on a path of impact. “It takes a village to raise a child, and teachers are a part of that village,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am without them.” 

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference (better known as AWP) was held in Los Angeles this year, and if you’ve been keeping up with us here, you know that we were thrilled to bring a bit of UNCW to the West Coast. It’s my third year as a UNCW MFA candidate and my third AWP, and I was thrilled to help represent our literary imprints, including Ecotone and Lookout Books. I’m on Ecotone’s design team and started working as an intern with Lookout last spring. I returned to Lookout’s practicum for my final MFA semester to support Bernardo Wade’s forthcoming poetry collection, A Love Tap, and to assist in the acquisitions process for future Lookout titles. 

With such a wealth of options when it comes to panels, bookfair offerings, and off-site events, AWP can be a bit overwhelming. I’m always grateful to have the UNCW table as my home base. When I arrived at the bookfair on the first morning, it was already bustling—with a full display of Lookout titles (including signed copies of Cameron Dezen-Hammon’s This Is My Body) and issues of the department’s journals, Chautauqua and Ecotone. The latest Ecotone was available, as were broadsides designed in the Publishing Lab to honor Ecotone’s twentieth anniversary. AWP always offers a great opportunity to connect with the authors we’ve had the honor of publishing.  

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Conference & Bookfair begins this week! UNCW’s creative writing programs, including our imprint Lookout Books and magazine Ecotone, will be represented at the nation’s largest marketplace for independent literary presses and journals. Please stop by tables 417–419 for giveaways and deals on our catalog of books and issues of the magazine, as well as to meet our faculty and student staff. 

Many of our authors, advisory board members, and faculty editors will be reading and speaking throughout the conference, so we’ve rounded up what are sure to be some of the biggest literary happenings in Los Angeles this week.

Thursday, March 27 / 9–10:15 a.m. 

The Personal Archives: Room 503, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center   

Presenters: Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Mary-Kim Arnold, Erica N. Cardwell, Athena Dixon, Moderator: Maddie Norris  

Creative nonfiction exists on a spectrum from internal to external, from “I” to “eye,” but what happens when we fit these together, when we approach the internal as external, turn the “eye” toward the “I”? These writers dig deep into life’s archives to find the truth of emotion, showing us the unique value of personal research. As panelists, they’ll discuss the practicalities of researching the personal, the ethics of doing so, and the craft involved in relaying the emotional truths unearthed.

Working as both an agent and a publicist affords Zoe the opportunity to contribute to opposite ends of a book’s life cycle. As an agent, she’s usually the author’s first reader and advocate in the publishing process, and in publicity, she helps build media attention leading up to a book’s publication day. To manage her two roles, Zoe keeps both of her inboxes open and toggles attention to the author or book with most momentum at any given time.

As a publicist, Zoe’s daily schedule is never the same. Every day brings its own project, but on the best days, she collaborates with women on both her agency and publicity teams, peppering the chat with questions, aggravations, and solutions to keep their outreach fresh and media contacts relevant. Zoe works closely with fellow UNCW alumna and Pine State Publicity founder, Cassie Mannes Murray. This spring, she’s working on Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays, as well as Keetje Kuipers’s Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (Watch for it in April 2025, if you’re a Brandi Carlile fan.) and Catherine Weiss’ Big Money P*rn* Mommy (forthcoming in March, for fans of “spicy” fiction who might be curious about how it impacts your dopamine receptors).

Zoe set out to build a list of books that center underrepresented regions in literature, often bringing into the conversation authors with Southern, midwestern, and southwestern perspectives.

At Howland Literary, a boutique agency run by five women, Zoe works alongside her team to curate a diverse list defined as much by genre and audience as by identity and geographic setting. She set out to build a list of books that center underrepresented regions in literature, often bringing into the conversation authors with Southern, midwestern, and southwestern perspectives. Recently, Zoe and Howland Literary President Carrie Howland co-represented Sara Maurer’s debut novel, A Good Animal, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in winter 2026, and Zoe’s first novel sale, Fireweed by Lauren Haddad, forthcoming in April from Astra House.

“As much as publishing can be about who you know, there is also magic,” Zoe says, “in the fact that every book person is just a person with their own unique network. When we can become the joint that connects two webs, we double who we know—collaboration further connects us. That’s how we move books.”

. . . every book person is just a person with their own unique network. When we can become the joint that connects two webs, we double who we know—collaboration further connects us. That’s how we move books.

This focus on collaboration is a hallmark of Lookout’s approach to publishing too. During Zoe’s senior year at UNCW, she enrolled in the Publishing Practicum with Emily Smith and took Sayantani Dasgupta’s Diversity in Publishing course, both of which helped her build a panoply of skills as well as her mission-driven approach to publishing. Zoe has adopted Lookout’s objective to offer a haven for books that matter in her ongoing work with both Pine State Publicity and Howland Literary.

According to PEN America, nearly 10,000 books have been banned in schools across the United States since the summer of 2021, many of which highlight the diverse experiences of women, people of color, members of the queer community, and other underrepresented voices—the kind of complex and beautiful stories we often bring to readers. Freedom to Read Day of Action offers members of the literary community an opportunity to rally together against banning, which “reached an all-time high in 2023 and continues to happen at an alarming rate.”  

In honor of Freedom to Read Day of Action, five members of Lookout’s student staff selected books that guide and inspire them. As practicum member Kennedy Cole writes, “Some of us are afraid to be challenged. Some of us fear change; change is startling and uncomfortable. Some of us readily acknowledge our diversity, but stumble over the words equity and inclusion. Books are primary tools of education, used to teach our history and our lived lives, and to point to potential futures.”

Independent publishers illustrate and uplift the unique voices and diverse experiences of our country—stories more likely to be silenced. At Lookout, that means representing traditionally marginalized voices, and as Bigger Than Bravery editor, Valerie Boyd, always put it, “gate bashing” instead of gatekeeping. And every individual can counteract the effects of growing censorship by reading, and sharing, banned books.

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.