Curating an Artistic Legacy: Writers as Family Archivists
Hugo House presents a conversation between writers Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of Captioning the Archives, and Lilly Dancyger, author of Negative Space. Join the artists as they discuss writing books using their fathers' artistic archives, reckoning with the myth-making of those men and their art, as well as curating their families' stories through the lens of artistic legacy.
Aisha Sloan
Aisha is the author of The Fluency of Light (University of Iowa Press 2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press 2017), Borealis (Coffee House 2021) and a collaborative book written with her father, Captioning the Archives (McSweeney's Publications 2021). Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit was nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest, and won CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction in 2018. Her writing can be found in Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Callaloo, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is the recipient of a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2021 National Magazine Award. She holds a dual appointment with LSA English Department's Helen Zell Writers' Program and the Residential College.
Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press. She is currently at work on an essay collection about the power and complexity of female friendship. Lilly's writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.
