Sirena on the Spectrum

Trinidad Escobar makes journalism comics and mystic poetry-comics. She is a Tantric Bhakti yogini of Water Serpent Dharma. Her art, music, and writing feature themes of social injustice, resistance, and transcendence. Her comic books include CRUSHED (2018), Most Intimate Friend (2020), Summon & Stir (2021), Ode to Keisha written by Jamila Rowser (2021), Arrive In My Hands (2022), and the forthcoming Of Sea and Venom (2027) published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers.

Trinidad is an artist who studies the transdisciplinary fields of art, poetry, systems theory, sociology, abolition, and folk anarcho-animism. She is a former college professor and creator of the courses Race & Comics and Gender & Comics at California College of the Arts. She helped develop the Genre Writing program 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’s YA graphic novel is inspired by the pre-colonial folk spiritualities and histories of Southeast Asia. Of Sea and Venom will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers in 2027.

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 and all the proceeds were donated to a family in Gaza, Palestine.

A short introduction speech by Trinidad Escobar at the Queer Ancestors Komix & Resistance reading on April 17, 2025 at the San Francisco Main Library.

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.

“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


Awards and Accolades:

Press: 

Cover of Drawing Power, published by Abrams

In 2019 Trinidad 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), Be Gay, Do Comics (IDW, Penguin Random House), and Cartoonists for Palestine (Crucial Comix). 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, Making Nonfiction Comics (Abrams), and more. 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.

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 Pilipino Farm Workers that hangs in the teen center in her hometown library. One of her favorite exhibits was Pinoy Power! at The Cartoon Art Museum where she was featured alongside her Pilipino cartoonist heroes.

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.

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.

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.

More!

Trinidad 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.

Trinidad is a descendant of nagini (serpents) and katao (merpeople); she is of fisherfolk from Northern and Eastern Samar, and Tondo. She is an adoptee who grew up on colonized, ancestral Tamien land in California, USA. Trinidad is a singer-songwriter in the gothic folk band charley riot. She lives a deeply spiritual, renunciate life with her writer son and partner who is a Nak Muay, or Muay Thai fighter. Together, they take care of their beloved Water Serpent Dharma shrine, their many animal family members and wildlife neighbors, as well as search for UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena :)

 
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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.