Assistant Professor, Creative Writing and Literature and English Language and Literature
About
Aisha was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her writing about race and current events is often coupled with analysis of art, film, and pop culture. She studied English Literature at Carleton College and went on to earn 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. Her essay collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. Her most recent essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and published in 2017. That book went on to be nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, and to win CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction. Her book-length essay, Borealis, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press’ Spatial Species imprint. She is a recipient of the 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Creative Writing.
Aisha’s essays are included in the anthologies: Dear America (forthcoming from Trinity University Press), Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism (Lookout Books 2019), Truth to Power (Cutthroat 2017), How We Speak to One Another (Coffee House Press 2017), The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press 2016) and Writing as Revision (Pearson Press, 2011). Her work has been named notable for the Best American Non-Required Reading and Best American Essays anthologies and nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her writing can be found in The Offing, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, Callaloo, The Southern Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Essay Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, Drunken Boat, Catapult, Sublevel, Autostraddle, Guernica, The Paris Review, and LitHub, among other places.
