Interviews

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. whenthecitysleeps’s tracks “For Emma” & “The Rain” are featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Chromic’s track “Lightless” is featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Annah Sidigu’s track “The Lynchpin” is featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Stephanie Henry’s tracks “Snowflakes at Midnight” & “Nocturne in G Minor” are featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Samantha Pearl’s track “Don’t Let Me Go” is featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Eki Shola’s track “Change the System” is featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. Mallika Vie’s tracks “Bluebells Still Grow” & “Since My Baby Said Goodbye” are featured in the volume. […]

This series spotlights musical artists from The Nasiona’s first compilation album, Volume 1: Petrichor. San Palo’s tracks “Rainy Day,” “Fall,” & “Try“ are featured in the volume. […]

Given the centering of Euro and Anglo authors, thinkers, artists, etc., our education systems in the US and Canada are still forms of colonial assimilation and propaganda. In the spirit of decolonizing our education, we introduce you to Fernando González, the philosopher of authenticity. To learn more about one of Colombia’s most influential and controversial writers, we speak with Gustavo A. Restrepo Villa, executive director of Corporación Otraparte, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and amplifying Fernando González’s work. […]

As a Black-Filipino United Statesian man with multiple sclerosis, Joe Sparkman talks about the “Scarlet Letter” of his diagnosis, the challenges he has faced getting a job, interactions he has had with doctors, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted his life and mental health. This is a candid conversation about the realities and the insidious nature of intersecting systems of oppression in the United States. […]

“When you’re mixed-race, someone’s always telling you who you’re not.” That’s the first line from Tamara Jong’s personal essay, “In Between,” which succinctly captures the essence of what it means to be mixed-race. Tamara Jong is a Canada-born mixed-race writer and cartoonist of Chinese and European ancestry. In November of 2019, Julián Esteban Torres López spoke with Tamara about her experience of being in between races, languages, and religions, and her journey to find a footing, identity, and community.  […]

Teatro Luna is an ensemble of Latina/x femmes and Women of Color creating empowering theatre, media, and training for social impact. On the 18th of June, 2020, Julián Esteban Torres López spoke with three of these radical culture makers and got a glimpse into Teatro Luna’s history, evolution, values, and sisterhood: Christina Igaraividez, Alexandra Meda, and Liza Ann Acosta. Here’s the conversation. […]

Ra Avis joins Julián Esteban Torres López again, this time to discuss how people do not rehabilitate via isolation alone, her experience dealing with grief and trauma while incarcerated, and the shocking aspect of realizing that one of the only women-run societies in the world is a women’s prison, which was one aspect of incarceration that she found herself missing after she was out. […]

Do prisons get rid of social problems, or do they create a lot of them? Should we abolish the prison system? What are the biggest barriers to prison abolition? What should people know about the prison system that most do not know? This is part 1 of a 2-part interview where I speak with Ra Avis to get a glimpse into incarceration and prison abolition. Ra Avis is a once-upon-a-time inmate, a reluctantly-optimistic widow, and a generational storyteller. […]

We showcase Carl Boon’s debut collection, PLACES & NAMES, and speak with the poet. His poems coalesce two kinds of history—the factual and the imagined—to produce a kind of intimacy greater than either fact or imagination. The people who inhabit these places—as we range from Saigon to northern Iraq; Athens, Ohio, to Libya; Ankara to Pittsburgh—become those places, inseparable from their geographies and histories, often unable to escape, bound by memory, nostalgia, and tradition. […]

In the second episode of our 2-part conversation, Tori Reid and Patrick A. Howell of Victory & Noble continue to unpack what it means to be a prophet in the Global International African Arts Movement, as well as what it means to be an evangelist, a seer, and a manifester; they open up about their most memorable conversations with cultural icons and how these conversations transformed them; they challenge the Hollywood industrial complex and push forward to reclaim our voices and tell our own stories. […]

Julián Esteban Torres López speaks with the two complementing spirits behind Victory & Noble, a storytelling company. In this 2-part conversation, Tori Reid and Patrick A. Howell reveal their legacy project, and their energy and determination are sure to inspire, educate, and transform. They both move us forward with a critical optimism rooted in both the real struggles of our past and our present, but also a futurism grounded in the belief that we have the power to harvest a tomorrow that is brighter than today. […]

In the previous episode, Lisa D. Gray, founder of Our Voices Our Stories SF, joined Julián Esteban Torres López to interrogate the publishing industry’s white gaze. In today’s episode, they discuss how we can protest the industry, and other institutions, and how we can gain power and find power in our everyday lives to dismantle and rebuild the world anew, even when under the yoke of systems of oppression like racism.  […]

Lisa D. Gray, founder of Our Voices Our Stories SF, joins Julián Esteban Torres López to interrogate the white gaze of the publishing industry. They challenge its myths about Black and brown communities; call out its performative allyship; expose its diversity, equity, and inclusion problem; and hold it accountable. They also center, elevate, and amplify Black and other People of Color writers, especially women. […]

In this in-depth interview with Yaldaz Sadakova—creator of Foreignish.net and author of The Wrong Passport: Memoir Stories About Immigration—we unpack the dreaded question “Where are you from?”, its limitations, how it’s a micro-aggression, and a better question to ask; Yaldaz speaks to how she found new emotional and intellectual anchors after leaving her birth country and how she found her creative voice in a foreign land; her feelings of shame and distress about forgetting her mother tongue; becoming estranged from her Turkish Muslim heritage; we interrogate our hesitation to correct people when they mispronounce our names; she elaborates as to why she’s convinced borders are a form of injustice; and much more. […]

Nasiona podcast producers and editors Aïcha Martine Thiam, Nicole Zelniker, and Julián Esteban Torres López explore why it’s so difficult to discuss race, how race differs in different countries, race in publishing, share personal anecdotes, and give our take on Jordan Peele’s “documentary” Get Out. We also have a post-production conversation about The Nasiona’s Being Mixed-Race podcast series: what hit home for us, what we learned, and what surprised us. […]

Today’s guest is the founder of Tono Latino, Sylvia Salazar—a Colombian immigrant and a computer engineer turned political activist. She is determined to change Latino representation in politics and in media. Tono Latino is a progressive platform that informs and educates Latinos about politics in the United States and encourages them to become more involved and vote. Why should the Latinx community get more politically involved? What are the potential consequences if we do not? Listen to find out. […]

Filmmaker Colette Ghunim on her first feature-length documentary: “Traces of Home tells the story of what happens when we as first-generation Americans go back to our roots to find out how where we come from shapes our identity. Through Traces of Home, I am telling my own personal story. I’m half Mexican and half Palestinian and both my parents were forced to leave their homes as children, and they both never returned since then. So through my film, we’re going back to Mexico and Palestine to try to find the original houses and to talk about why people are leaving and immigrating and why refugees are leaving as well, during a time when we need to hear it the most.” […]

We speak with Ruben Quesada, founder of the Latinx Writers Caucus, to discuss what Latinx means to him, why he felt the need to create the Latinx Writers Caucus, advice he would give Latinx writers, Latinx voices and the industry, and more. […]

In her most recent interview with The Nasiona, award-winning poet Doyali Islam shares what it means to be a cis-woman with vaginismus, how to overcome the struggles of being a poet, and the importance of celebrating her body. […]

When Irma Herrera gives her name its correct Spanish pronunciation, some assume she’s not a real American. Her play, Why Would I Mispronounce My Own Name?, is one woman’s journey from a small segregated South Texas town to California’s multicultural mecca. In this wide-ranging interview, we explore her Chicana identity, colorism, linguistic isolation, cultural hybridity, class migration, her social justice work, how her play is relevant to current events, and her transition into becoming a playwright. […]

Even after Brown v. Board of Education, race is still a contentious topic in education. In fact, we’re more segregated today than we were in the late 1960s, but most people wouldn’t know that from their high school history classes. Race is still something we don’t teach in school unless it’s firmly placed in the past. Going against the grain is historian James Shields from Guilford College, a sought-after educator and speaker on anti-racism, community engagement, and Underground Railroad history. […]