Silo City Reading Series: Tarfia Faizullah, Siew Hii, Olivia Block, D. Sloan

Featured Artists

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  Tarfia Faizullah Poet
  

  Tarfia Faizullah

  Poet

  Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in The Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, The New Republic, The Nation, and Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia currently lives in Dallas.

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  Olivia Block Media Artist + Composer
  

  Olivia Block

  Media Artist + Composer

  Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Her discography, spanning nearly thirty years, is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Ina GRM, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including Rewire, MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal, Sonic Light, Redbull Academy, Kontraste, Archipel, and many others. Her installations have been shown at The Nasher Sculpture Museum, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania, CEAM at Flagler University, MCA Chicago, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Museo Reina Sofia, The Smart Museum at University of Chicago, Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design, Sokolowsko Sanitorium (Poland), CONTEXT (Miami and NY) and The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago). She has taught at The School of the Art Institute in the Sound Department and at Northwestern University in the Sound Arts and Industries program. She has completed many university teaching residencies and teaches workshops around the world.
 Olivia is based in Chicago, and travels widely for her work.

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  D. Sloan Artist
  

  D. Sloan

  Artist

  D. Sloan (b. 1990) traded the Vegas heat for the Buffalo cold. She co-curates the Museum of Cold—an archive of cold as muse, co-edits the theory-fiction journal TRANSVERSALS, and is the proprietor of a flower shop. She creates alternative systems for divining the future through casting lots (keys and coins, in this case). She likes to write with photography and prefers not to use the viewfinder, instead trading composition for spiritual intervention.

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  Siew Hii Poet + Writer
  

  Siew Hii

  Poet + Writer

  Siew Hii (she/they) is the author of Entered Some Aliens (University of Wisconsin Press, 2026). Her prose and poetry appear in AGNI, Electric Lit, Story, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Mobile, Alabama, Hii now lives in Orlando, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her parents hail from Sibu, Malaysia and Kentucky, USA.