The Nasiona Podcast
Episodes
Most environments are not designed to include and value everyone, and as a result such designs fail to center the concerns of those in the bottom rungs of our class and caste systems. So, if we really want to value and include everyone in our teams, in our communities, in our societies, in our politics, then we have to be intentional in the way we design our worlds. We must be intentional in the way we invent environments and oppor...
Given the centering of Euro and Anglo authors, thinkers, artists, etc., and the deliberate attempt to conceal unpleasant and incriminating facts about history and other content taught K-12 and beyond, our education systems in the United States and Canada are still forms of forced colonial assimilation and propaganda.
In the spirit of decolonizing our education, we introduce to Fernando González, who has been regarded at one time or...
Today, I introduce you to one of my oldest friends, Joe Sparkman, one half of The Nasiona Podcast’s music production team, The Heavyweights. We’ve got Joe and Marcus Allen to thank for our new musical vibe. Later in February, Aïcha Martine Thiam and I are going live with our new The Nasiona music series, where we will center, elevate, and amplify Black, Indigenous, and People of Color musical artists, and shed light on their experi...
In the United States, we’ve been radicalized to assume ourselves as great, at the detriment of ourselves, our country, and the world. Our collective arrogance, self-absorption, and superiority complex will be our downfall if we do not course-correct immediately. A turbulent future is here and on the horizon. The intensity of that turbulence will depend on how we prepare and act today.
A citizen of the Quechan (Yuma Indian) Nation, Deborah Taffa’s writing can be found at dozens of outlets including PBS, Salon, The Huff Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, A Public Space, The Boston Review, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her memoir manuscript won the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award in December, 2019. She teaches creative writing at Webster and Washington University in Saint Louis, MO, an...
Nuestras industrias del entretenimiento tienden a destacar y mostrar historias de profesionales, pero es más raro que le demos una plataforma a la gente común para que hable.
Como resultado, perdemos no solo algunas historias verdaderamente extraordinarias, sino también la sabiduría que brindan estas vidas vividas. De vez en cuando, te encuentras con alguien que lo tiene todo: la experiencia vivida, la sabiduría y el talento para c...
When speaking about the series of original short stories from Latinas across the states, entitled Talking While Female and Other Dangerous Acts, co-producer of the Audible original book, Alexandra Meda, says: “They are all little jewels, little lessons on how to live bravely, how to get up after a failure, how to love yourself more, and how to spread the love with others.” Her words describe the book perfectly, and also capture the...
On episode 34, Ra Avis joined me to discuss incarceration and prison abolition. We unpacked how prisons create many social problems, what some of the biggest barriers to prison abolition are, and what people should know about the prison system that most do not.
On today's episode, Ra Avis joins me again, this time to discuss how people do not rehabilitate via isolation alone, her experience dealing with grief and trauma while ...
Ra Avis is an award-winning blogg...
In case you didn’t know, before there was The Nasiona Podcast there was (and still is) The Nasiona Magazine. On August 29th, we celebrated the magazine’s 2-year anniversary. We continued the celebration this week with our previous episode highlighting one of our authors, Carl Boon, and his imaginative biography poetry collection, PLACES & NAMES, published by The Nasiona Publishing House. We continue this celebration on today’s ...
The poems in Carl Boon’s debut collection, PLACES & NAMES, coalesce two kinds of history—the factual and the imagined—to produce a kind of intimacy that is greater than either fact or imagination. It is this sense of intimacy that brings the poems to life. We encounter real places sometimes—places we see on maps and highway signs—but also places that exist only in the imagination. We encounter names that are both recognizable a...
In the second episode of our 2-part conversation, Tori Reid and Patrick A. Howell of storytelling company 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 manifestor; they open up about their most memorable conversations with cultural icons and how these conversations transformed them; Tori and Patrick ...
It was a pleasure to speak with the two complementing spirits behind Victory & Noble, a storytelling company. In this 2-part conversation for our Deconstructing Dominant Cultures Series, Tori Reid and Patrick A. Howell — children of cultural and intellectual icons — reveal their own legacy project, and their energy and determination are sure to inspire, educate, and transform.
Both Tori and Patrick — with Victory & Noble, w...
In the previous episode, Lisa D. Gray, the founder and curator of Our Voices Our Stories SF, joined me to interrogate the publishing industry’s white gaze. In today’s episode, we 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.
We ended the first part ...
Beware of the white gaze. In this episode, Lisa D. Gray, founder of Our Voices Our Stories SF, joins me to stare down this omnipresent white gaze, which is prevalent in every space, in every industry, in every community of this white supremacist country. In particular, we place the publishing industry in the interrogation room and make our list of demands.
We discuss how we can hold those wielding power in the industry accountable...
On 8 March 2019, The Nasiona‘s co-Founder, Julián Esteban Torres López, was the keynote speaker at “Cruzando Fronteras”—an event on immigration and border crossing, hosted by Central Americans for Empowerment (CAFÉ) at California State University, Chico. Julián’s speech tackled the role of storytelling as a tool of empowerment that can disrupt the status quo, confront caricatures, change politics by first changing culture, and help...
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 ...
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.
The podcast series is the companion to Zelniker's book, Mixed, published by The Nasiona and available in paperback...
My guest today is the founder of Tono Latino, Sylvia Salazar. Sylvia is a Colombian immigrant and a computer engineer turned political activist. Her passion is helping other people understand what is going on in the world of politics and to encourage them to become more politically involved and vote. She is determined to change Latino representation in politics and in media.
Tono Latino is a progressive platform that informs and ...