Thank you.
I'm so excited about this reading.
In the last essay of her new collection,
Aisha Sabatini Sloan sees an owl.
That had to have been a hawk, she tells herself.
It's still daylight.
But the eyes of the owl haunt her,
and she shares the experience with a friend
who studies Chinese medicine.
If you've seen an owl, you are being
asked to use your powers of keen silent observation
to intuit some life situation, the friend tells her.
Pay attention to the signals and omens.
And she does.
Her debut essay collection, titled The Fluency of Light:
Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White,
is rich with silent observations and collected omens.
Sloan is a master of the braided essay,
pairing her own understated experiences of race and place
with a startling but brilliant array of other stories.
In the first essay, "Birth of the Cool,"
Sloan explores her first experiences of race
against a backdrop of Thelonious Monk as he glints and pauses
on stage, leaving listeners with the shadow of what he means.
In Aisha's work, we make meaning in the gaps like this.
The sentences are clear, exquisitely wrought,
and the voice consistent even as the essay backdrop moves on.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan earned a master
of arts in cultural studies and studio art
from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU.
She also completed her MFA in creative nonfiction
writing here at the University of Arizona.
Her essays have been named notable for The Best American
Nonrequired Reading and The Best American anthologies,
were nominated for a Pushcart Prize,
and her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Identity
Theory, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, Callaloo,
and The Southern Review.
She has taught writing for more than six years here
at the University of Arizona, and she is currently
a contributing editor for Guernica,
a magazine of art and politics.
In "Birth of the Cool," Sloan writes, "To glint
is to throw a brief glance at something
or to take a brief look.
It means to be shiny as if wet, to glisten,
to be looked upon by light."
Sloan's writing is like this, a beam glancing sideways,
illuminating for a moment what is often so hard for us to see.
We're so fortunate tonight to have
Aisha Sabatini Sloan with us.
Please welcome her.
[APPLAUSE]