Trinidad Escobar

Trinidad Escobar is a multidisciplinary artist from the Philippines who grew up on colonized, ancestral Tamien Ohlone land in California, USA. She is a cartoonist of poetry, memoir, and journalism comics.

Trinidad is a former college professor of Race & Comics at California College of the Arts. She continues her work as a grassroots popular education teacher in partnership with community efforts like the Queer Ancestors Project. Trinidad is a descendant of revolutionaries who fought for Philippine independence against both Spanish and American imperialists. She is a lifelong student of Buddhism, martial arts, and abolition.

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, an M.F.A. in Contemplative Poetry from the Jack Kerouac School, and an M.F.A. in Comics from California College of the Arts.

Cover of Drawing Power, published by Abrams

The first book of Trinidad’s memoir, CRUSHED, was published in 2018. It is a comic about adoption, undiagnosed Autism, 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 Pinay Power, 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). Her poem-comics have been featured in literary journals like Shenandoah and The Brooklyn Review. She made funnies for The New Yorker. Her comics journalism has been featured The Nib, The Washington Post, and other newspapers. Her most treasured projects include making: poem-comics with incarcerated youth with the help of educator and artist Maddy “MADlines” Clifford, a series of Narcan posters for the county of Alameda in California for overdose awareness, 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.

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.

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 Autistic and ADHD. She aims to communicate to the public about disabilities 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.

Trinidad is in California with her surfer partner, writer son, and their many animals. She lives a deeply spiritual, quiet Buddhist life with her family. She donates all of her total earnings to Native Ohlone, Palestinian, and Filipino families.

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”
— Andy Oliver, Broken Frontier, UK
“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 ...”
— Carrie McClain, Women Write About Comics, USA
“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. ”
— Christine Pasalo Norland, Hello Barkada, USA

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


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