The Nasiona Podcast

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 ...

Chicago-based filmmaker Colette Ghunim’s passion lies at the cross-section of social impact and visual storytelling. Her first documentary, The People’s Girls, received worldwide attention for its bold spotlight on Egypt’s issue of sexual harassment. With recognition by major international outlets, The People’s Girls trailer enticed over 2 million views.

Colette is currently working on Traces of Home, her first feature-length film ...

When Irma Herrera gives her name its correct Spanish pronunciation, some people 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 explored many topics, such as the difficulty to access safe spaces for those of us deemed second-class citizens, her Chicana identit...

Most people know about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that integrated US schools for the first time. What many people don’t realize—especially if they’ve been brought up in very white communities—is that race is still a contentious topic in education. In fact, we’re more segregated today than we were in the late 1960s, according to The Atlantic, PolitiFact, Vox, and others, but most people wouldn’t know that fr...

Most TV and movies portray adoption as a white parent adopting a child. This is true in such mainstream shows as Friends, Glee, 90210, Modern Family, Sex and The City, Grey’s Anatomy, and Parenthood. This representation is often how people think of adoption, something that can get frustrating for Nishta J. Mehra, an Indian woman with a white wife and black adopted child.

As a child, Nishta grew up as one of the only Indian children...

Minimalism is intentionally living with only the things you really need. Minimalists maintain that there are benefits to minimalist living, like reduced anxiety, lower expenses, increased productivity, and living a more fulfilling life. But not all minimalists go so far as to reduce their possessions to live out of a van ... for years ... intentionally. My guest today is author David Soto Jr. and he is (or maybe was) one of these v...

In addition to being multiracial, many mixed-race Americans are also multicultural. For example, in The Nasiona’s book Mixed, Nicole Zelniker wrote about Kazu and Lynda Gomi. Kazu is Japanese, from Japan, and Lynda is a white US American. Naomi Raquel Enright is one such person, and she writes about her own experience with race and racism in her book, Strength of Soul.

Interwoven with her own story of being born to a Jewish America...

Publishing has a race problem. Entertainment Weekly reported that only 7.8% of romance authors using a traditional publisher were people of color in 2016. For that same year, NPR found that only 22% of all characters in children’s books were characters of color.

This, in a country where people of color are expected to make up more than half of the population by 2044 according to The Center for American Progress. For this reason, wr...

In 2017, editors Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, along with co-editor Cathy Schlund-Vials, published a volume of essays entitled The Beiging of America: Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. This collection joins others such as Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time and A Race Anthology, edited by Dan Moulthrop and R.A. Washington.

Still, books about race, especially about being mixed-race, are few and far between. In this collecti...

How can memoir be a political act? When living under oppressive systems, the simple act of standing up and sharing personal stories that go against the mainstream is a political act. Mireya S. Vela and Julián Esteban Torres López meditate on this issue, which is an essential part of each other’s work. Vela speaks from the perspective of an author, while Torres López forwards his experience as a publisher. Through their work, they b...