The Nasiona Podcast Julián Esteban Torres López

We continue with the second part of my conversation with Natalie Obando, the current national president of the Women’s National Book Associatio and first Latina to take the helm. They continue to discuss the Authentic Voices Fellowship Program, her experiences and thoughts about the White Gaze in publishing and storytelling industries, how she uses her influence to transition us out of it so we can become more authentic and reflect a more realistic representation, and much more. They also dissect the harmful urge to center the comfort of others by anglicizing our names, thereby decentering ourselves at the outset of relationships, and the kind of impact this form of code-switching has on us and our communities. If you have not already, we encourage you to go back and listen to the first part so you can better situate yourself in today’s episode.
This 2-part conversation is the first of our new The Nasiona Podcast series showcasing the authentic voices of Women of Color writers. The Nasiona teamed up with the Women’s National Book Association’s Authentic Voices Fellowship Program and the Women of Color Writers organization to publish their inaugural first anthology, entitled The Roots That Help Us Grow: An Authentic Voices Anthology, Volume 1. Check our website at thenasiona.com for more information on the anthology.
For our podcast series, I interviewed everyone we published in the anthology to present you with an in-depth exploration of their individual literary journeys, their relationships to authenticity, experiences where they learned that language and their stories have power, obstacles they have experienced as Women of Color writers, the stories we included in the anthology, and much more. 
With the Authentic Voices Fellowship program, the anthology, and this podcast series, we seek to bring BIPOC women to a deeper level of inclusion in the publishing industry and the literary world at large. Through the words of these inaugural fellows, the reader and listener may understand how telling these stories – despite the tragedy, trauma, injustice, political movements, language barriers, and grief involved  – allows one to root more deeply into a heritage that helps us grow.
President Obando and I spoke on November 27th, 2021. This is the second of our two-part conversation. Thank you for listening.
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The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López @je_torres_lopez.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights. Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners like you. We hope the value of our work to our community is worth your patronage. If you like what we do, please show this by liking, rating, and reviewing us; buying or recommending our books; and by financially supporting our work either through The Nasiona’s Patreon page or through Julián Esteban Torres López's Ko-fi donation platform. Every little bit helps.
Thank you for listening and reading, and thank you for your support.

Today’s 2-part conversation is the first of The Nasiona’s new series showcasing the authentic voices of Women of Color writers. The Nasiona teamed up with the Women’s National Book Association’s Authentic Voices Fellowship Program and the Women of Color Writers organization to publish their inaugural first anthology, entitled The Roots That Help Us Grow: An Authentic Voices Anthology, Volume 1. Check our website at thenasiona.com for more information on the anthology.
For our podcast series, I interviewed everyone we published in the anthology to present you with an in-depth exploration of their individual literary journeys, their relationships to authenticity, experiences where they learned that language and their stories have power, obstacles they have experienced as Women of Color writers, the stories we included in the anthology, and much more. 
With the Authentic Voices Fellowship program, the anthology, and this podcast series, we seek to bring BIPOC women to a deeper level of inclusion in the publishing industry and the literary world at large. Through the words of these inaugural fellows, the reader and listener may understand how telling these stories – despite the tragedy, trauma, injustice, political movements, language barriers, and grief involved – allows one to root more deeply into a heritage that helps us grow.
Today’s episode is special episode with the visionary behind the Authentic Voices program: a bad-ass chingona who goes by many variations of her first name – Nat, Natí, Nato, Natalie, or Natalia – but who I like to refer to as President Obando as a sign of respect. Natalia Obando has worked in the world of book publicity since 2008, is the founder of Do Good Public Relations and the grassroots organization Women of Color Writers Podcast and Programming.
She is the current national president of the Women’s National Book Association, overseeing all chapters nationwide. As the first Latina president of the Women’s National Book Association, her goal has been promoting diversity in publishing via grassroots efforts through both organizations. She has since been a panelist and speaker at some of the most well-regarded literary conferences in the industry, including the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, The West Coast Writer’s Conference, the Central Coast Writer’s Conference, as well as conferences that focus on diversity in publishing, such as Centering on the Margins. When she’s not championing for others in the book world, she is writing novels and screenplays rooted in Latinx folklore and magick. You can find her on LinkedIn as Natalie Obando and on Instagram as @dogooderbookgal
President Obando and I spoke on November 27th, 2021. This is the first of our two-part conversation, where we discuss her own experience in the literary world as a Latina, along with the origin story and breakdown of the Authentic Voices Fellowship Program. We then transition into a discussion on the White Gaze in publishing and how she’s using her influence to transition us out of it so we can become more authentic and reflect a more realistic representation. We end Part One of the conversation dissecting the pros and cons of code-switching and how through us coming together in solidarity we can gain more power and lift each other up.
So let’s get to it. I’ll drop you in where President Obando is discussing some of the stories in the anthology. Thank you for listening.
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The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some

What is the relationship between psychological trauma and physical Illness? Co-producer Nicole Zelniker joins Julián Esteban Torres López on the podcast to interview Molly “Marco” Marcotte to answer this question. 
Molly “Marco” Marcotte (they/them) is program designer, evaluator, and consultant in their eighth year of work in the anti-violence field. They have co-implemented and evaluated over 30 county-level sexual violence primary prevention initiatives, co-authored multiple state-level and organizational change models and corresponding evaluation plans, designed culturally relevant programming and evaluation for colleges across the Southeast, and have helped construct 50 research and evaluation instruments. Existing as a multilingual, neurodivergent, queer, non-binary femme informs every aspect of their approach, particularly in building authentic rapport and community-centered definitions of programmatic success.

With this episode we usher in our new series for 2022 on disability, mental health, and chronic conditions.


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The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López @je_torres_lopez.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights. Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners like you. We hope the value of our work to our community is worth your patronage. If you like what we do, please show this by liking, rating, and reviewing us; buying or recommending our books; and by financially supporting our work either through The Nasiona’s Patreon page or through Julián Esteban Torres López's Ko-fi donation platform. Every little bit helps.
Thank you for listening and reading, and thank you for your support.

“I don’t want to make sense anymore,” Robin Gow wrote in Blue Blood, “I just want to exist.” 
"These days we only seem to talk about trans people in the news when we talk about bathroom laws. Our bodies are made political. Somedays I just want to exist. I want to crawl into the corn fields before harvest and just be alone with my skin," wrote Robin Gow.
On today’s episode, I speak with Robin Gow and showcase some of the pieces found in their new essays and poetry collection Blue Blood, published by The Nasiona.
Robin Gow is a queer and trans poet, essayist, and Young Adult author. They grew up in rural Pennsylvania and live in Allentown with their partner, best friend, and two pugs, Eddie and Gertie.
Gow is also the author of the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019), the collection Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020), and a YA verse-novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions (FSG 2022),
He is a managing editor at The Nasiona, Assistant Editor at Large at Doubleback Books, and a reader for the Young Adult magazine Voyage.
When I was first introduced to Robin’s work back in 2018, I immediately wanted to publish it. After reading some of their other pieces published in different magazines, I reached out to Robin to ask if they had enough for a collection. It was at that point that we decided to create what has become one of my favorite books of the year: Blue Blood.
We all begin in water and are called back to water. Blue Blood challenges the rhetoric that trans people are “unnatural” through captivating verses about metamorphosis and meditations on the concept of home. Robin Gow invites readers to celebrate identity; to question what their own body means to them.
Essayist and editor Wren Awry, for example, had the following to say about Blue Blood:
“In a world where trans people must define ourselves over and over again in order to be seen, Robin Gow’s refusal to offer neat conclusions is refreshing. Instead, these essays and poems—on everything from horse shoe crabs and bearded women to St. Francis and Georgia O’Keefe—lean into the complexities of gender, family, ecology, and mental health. If Gow’s book has a thesis, it’s that who we are and how we see the world are so fluid and shaped by so much that it’s impossible to unravel it all on paper. The best we can do is lean into the mess and pull out what we can and my, what beauty lies there!”
With this episode we continue to pull back the layers to reveal the themes and topics and approaches and angles of Blue Blood.

We conducted the interview via email correspondence in November of 2020. Thank you for listening.
Thank you to Robin Gow for being our guest today. Thank you to Amanda Lopez for helping me produce this episode and for being the lead The Nasiona editor for Blue Blood. 
Interested in getting a copy of Robin’s newest collection of essays and poems? Go here or to thenasiona.com and search for Blue Blood by Robin Gow.
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The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López @je_torres_lopez.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights. Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on v

In this episode, we share the second part of a virtual public event Julián Esteban Torres López gave on November 10th, hosted by the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts at Texas A&M University, San Antonio. Be sure to check out Part 1, where Julián gives a talk on what it means to decolonize and indigenize storytelling. For this final part today, Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez Sabogal, interviews Julián, followed by a Q&A with the audience moderated by Dr. Katherine Gillen, the Chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts. We discuss:
the relationship between language and identity,  how the concept of time can be a tool to challenge hegemonic epistemologies, the importance of centering and circulating thinking and art from the Global South, how we can stand up for our own concerns in a colonized landscape, the challenges of being multilingual in a society that encourages monolingualism, And much more. We jump into the moment of the event when Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez Sabogal asks Julián about his own experiences. Given that Julián was born in Colombia, and raised in both Colombia and the United States, and having also lived in Canada, Chile, and Japan, she asked him how his global experience influenced or informed how he defines himself as an artist and storyteller. We start the episode with Julián answering this question. Thank you for listening.
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We’d like to thank the Dr. Alexandra Rodriguez Sabogal and Dr. Katherine Gillen (chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Arts at Texas A&M, San Antonio) for all of the hours of preparation they put into making this event happen. Also thank you to Myrna Garza (chair of Native American Heritage Month Committee) and Tamara Hinojosa and the President’s Commission on Equity for their work and support of this event. We’d also like to thank the university’s Spanish, Bilingual Education, Mexican-American and Latinx Studies, Communication, English, and First Year Experience programs for making this event possible. And gracias to the entire Texas A&M, San Antonio, cohort and everyone who attended the event virtually from around the world. 
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The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López @je_torres_lopez.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights. Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners like you. We hope the value of our work to our community is worth your patronage. If you like what we do, please show this by liking, rating, and reviewing us; buying or recommending our books; and by financially supporting our work either through The Nasiona’s Patreon page or through Julián Esteban Torres López's Ko-fi donation platform. Every little bit helps.
Thank you for listening and reading, and thank you for your support.

What does it mean to show up as you beyond the you you were told to be? Christine Cariño joins Julián Esteban Torres López to discuss the philosophy of authenticity, how getting over trauma often means finding your way back to that person you were before the trauma, and the transformative process of rerooting and replanting yourself and reclaiming deferred dreams. This episode is about healing, empowerment, and giving ourselves permission to say yes to ourselves, to allow ourselves to feel, and to create the conditions we need to fully become ourselves.

Christine Cariño is a transformation catalyst, a queer nonbinary immigrant of Filipino heritage who’s passionate about creating an inclusive and equitable global society. She is also the Founder & Managing Partner of Conscious Thrive LLC. a consulting firm that helps businesses embody the work of diversity, equity and inclusion. Christine designs and facilitates transformation workshops in-person and virtually, with notable international experience. She is a proponent of authenticity and radical self-love as resistance. Her coaching practice is centered in empowering global majority leaders reach their next level of success through healing and authenticity so they can create impact on their own terms.
Prior to her work, she has spent over eight years in corporate America as a Recruitment and Staffing strategist where she has coached professionals throughout the hiring process and advised business leaders in different industries on staffing and retention strategies best fit within their organizational needs. She holds a Bachelor's in International Studies; a Diploma in Coaching from NYU and a DEI in the workplace certificate from University of South Florida.
She believes that for us to create a thriving, loving and inclusive world, we must start the work within. To heal, love and include all parts of who we are creates the ripple of change we want to see in our family, relationships, communities and society.
consciousthrive.com
IG: @consciousthrive  
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ccarino
Christine Cariño and Julián Esteban Torres López spoke on the 17th of November 2021. This is that conversation. Thank you for listening.
The Nasiona Podcast amplifies the voices and experiences of the marginalized, undervalued, overlooked, silenced, and forgotten, as well as gives you a glimpse into Othered worlds. We focus on stories that explore the spectrum of human experiences—stories based on facts, truth-seeking, human concerns, real events, and real people, with a personal touch. From liminal lives to the marginalized, and everything in between, we believe that the subjective can offer its own reality and reveal truths some facts can’t discover. Hosted, edited, and produced by Julián Esteban Torres López @je_torres_lopez.
Please follow The Nasiona on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for regular updates: @TheNasiona
Original music for The Nasiona Podcast was produced by the Grammy Award-winning team of Joe Sparkman and Marcus Allen, aka The Heavyweights. Joe Sparkman: Twitter + Instagram. Marcus Allen: Twitter + Instagram.
The Nasiona Magazine and Podcast depend on voluntary contributions from readers and listeners like you. We hope the value of our work to our community is worth your patronage. If you like what we do, please show this by liking, rating, and reviewing us; buying or recommending our books; and by financially supporting our work either through The Nasiona’s Patreon page or through Julián Esteban Torres López's Ko-fi donation platform. Every little bit helps.
Thank you for listening and reading, and thank you for your support.