Trinidad Escobar
Trinidad Escobar is a multidisciplinary artist, an Autistic-ADHD savant, a Buddhist upāsikā, and death priestess.
She is a former college professor of Race & Comics and Gender & Comics at California College of the Arts. She also taught Creative Writing at the low-residency M.F.A. program at Western Colorado University. She continues her work as a popular education and contemplative arts teacher in partnership with community organizations like the Queer Ancestors Project.
Trinidad is a descendant of fisherfolk and revolutionaries who fought for Philippine independence against Spanish, American, and Japanese imperialists. She is an adoptee from the Philippines who grew up on colonized, ancestral Tamien Ohlone land in California, USA where she lives now with her son and partner, both Autistic savants.
Trinidad is a 2023-2024 Creative Wildfire fellow. Through this artist residency, and with the help of Maria R. Palacios from Sins Invalid and the Crip Survival Network, she created a 34-page poem-comic on disability and climate justice.
Her YA graphic novel is inspired by her and her son’s experience with Autism as well as the colonial history of the South Pacific. It will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers in 2026.
She holds a B.A. degree in Poetry from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. in Comics from California College of the Arts. Before pursuing her life in comics she studied contemplative arts and eco-psychology at the Buddhist arts college Naropa University. She is a fellow of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
The first book of Trinidad’s memoir, CRUSHED, was published in 2018. It is a comic about adoption, mental health, spirituality, and finding home. The fifth printing of CRUSHED was sold out in April 2024. All proceeds were donated to families in Gaza, Palestine.
In 2019 she was the guest speaker at the Pinay Power conference, hosted by McGill University and Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal, Canada. In 2020 her comics were featured in Eisner, Ringo, and Ignatz-winning anthologies like Drawing Power (Abrams) and Be Gay, Do Comics (IDW, Penguin Random House). Her poem-comics have been featured in literary journals like Shenandoah and The Brooklyn Review. The New Yorker invited her to make funnies, or humor comic strips, for their daily comics. Her comics journalism has been featured in The Nib, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. Trinidad’s poem-comic on sexual violence was on display at The Society of Illustrators as well as at the first-ever international Women in Comics 2021 exhibits in Rome and Naples, Italy.
Trinidad’s book Arrive In My Hands, an Ignatz and Broken Frontier Award-nominated collection of erotic lesbian poetry-comics was published by Black Josei Press in 2022.
Her one-shot comic Ode to Keisha with Jamila Rowser was named as one of the best comics of 2021 by The Nerdist. Ode to Keisha also won a Broken Frontier Award and earned a nomination for an Ignatz in 2022. Ode to Keisha was published in the European Union and Japan.
Her most treasured projects include making: community mural programs for formerly incarcerated men in partnership with the Oakland Peace Center and the East Bay Meditation Center; poem-comics with incarcerated youth with the help of artist Maddy “MADlines” Clifford; a series of Narcan posters for overdose awareness in Alameda County in California; yearly artwork for teen parents at Hilltop School in San Francisco; and a community mural commemorating the Filipino Farm Workers that hangs in the teen center in her hometown library.
Public Speaking
Trinidad was an outreach coordinator for the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ community center’s youth program. She participated in public speaking panels about Queer identity from 2005 to 2009. She was a guest artist and panelist at the Society of Illustrators, San Diego Comic-Con, SFMoMa, San Jose Museum of Art, Comic Arts Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the American Library Association Conference, Pilipino Komix Expo, LitQuake, Drawn & Quarterly, SF Zine Fest, The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, Queer Ancestors Project, The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, and more.
Citizen Science & More
Trinidad is a savant-Autistic and ADHD. This means that she was born with certain skills and knowledge. She aims to communicate to the public about disabilities and gifts like her own. She served for eight years as an independent living aid and direct supported living staff for adults with developmental disabilities. Her life in the disabled community shapes her perception of the world.
Trinidad taught elementary science and art classes at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA because of her passion for S.T.E.A.M. programs. She is a citizen scientist who participates in backyard and local conservation research in the Bay Area. Her backyard is a functioning outdoor lab and mini astrobiology observatory for Anton Data Report.
She donates her total earnings to Native Ohlone, as well as families in Palestine, Sudan, the Philippines, and more. She lives a deeply spiritual, quiet life with her family.
In 2019, Trinidad was named as one of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts's most influential global artists for her comics-journalism. However, YBCA has refused to denounce the atrocities and crimes that the illegal Israeli government has perpetrated against the Palestinian people. YBCA has attempted to silence and control its pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist artists. As an adoptee from a colonized land she dedicates her art and work to all colonized people including the people of Palestine. Trinidad rejects YBCA and its awards because they are institutions of apartheid and tools of genocide.
“Liberating and triumphant”
“The best way to help describe how reading Arrive in my Hands makes me feel is the inclusion of a line from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power” essay from her book, Sister Outsider. Lorde wrote: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women…The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.” Erotica, long damned and misunderstood, has been maligned over the years as a genre and Escobar’s work here presents a bold reclaiming ...”
“On the whole, Arrive In My Hands lays bare a compelling testimony of what is possible when a (Filipina) woman (re)claims love and pleasure for herself. In showing women with sexual agency prioritizing their own needs and choosing each other as partners, Escobar’s work breathes like a resource, providing a language and imagery that reassures and validates. ”
REVIEW: The Breadth of Trinidad Escobar's Arrive In My Hands | Hello Barkada
Due to the explicit content of the collection, Arrive In My Hands is for readers 18+ years of age. What you will find is not cheap smut, but an allegorical sophistication that not only arouses the libido but stimulates the critical mind. Each poem comic is a small gateway to Queer power—the inclusivity of all those contradictions, struggles, rebellions, truths, and questions that topple a white patriarchal heteronormative hegemony. Arrive In My Hands reveals that we are seething with Queerness and feminism where we find ourselves finally free.
- Elsa Valmidiano, Slicing Tomatoes, USA
REVIEW: Seething with Queer Sensuality | Honey Literary | Elsa Valmidiano
Awards and Accolades:
Nominated for Breakout Talent and Best One Shot for the Broken Frontier Awards 2022
Favorite Small Press Books of 2022 | Women Write About Comics
Press:
REVIEW: Arrive In My Hands: Queer Erotic Comics is Poetic Magic | WWAC
REVIEW: “Seething With Queer Sensuality: A Book Review of Arrive In My Hands by Trinidad Escobar” | Honey Literary
REVIEW: The Breadth of Trinidad Escobar's Arrive In My Hands | Hello Barkada
Artist Feature: Issue No. 58, Anniversary Issue: Trinidad Escobar | Content Magazine
Here's a queer erotic comic told through the gaze of a gay Filipina-American poet | Manila Bulletin
Best Comics of 2021: Ode to Keisha by Jamila Rowser and Trinidad Escobar | Nerdist