Galleys available in April National print, radio, and online campaign Targeted bookseller mailing and direct outreach to Alaskan bookstores Collaborative events with Lorna Simpson and Gabrielle Civil Advertising to launch Spatial Species series: Rain Taxi, social media boosted posts Promotion on Coffee House Press e-newsletter, website, and social media channels Giveaways on Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads Simultaneous print and e-book release Inclusion on academic website and mailing to encourage course adoption

Art about glaciers, queer relationships, political anxiety, and the meaning of Blackness in open space—Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s experiences moving through the Alaskan outdoors.  In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan observes shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and Black fellow travelers while feeling menaced by the specter of nature writing. She considers the meaning of open spaces versus enclosed ones and maps out the web of queer relationships that connect her to this quaint Alaskan town. Triangulating the landscapes she moves through with glacial backdrops in the work of Black conceptual artists and writers, Sabatini Sloan complicates tropes of Alaska to suggest that the excitement, exploration, and possibility of myth-making can also be twinned by isolation, anxiety, and boredom. Borealis is the first book commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.