Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsambuddhassa

Portrait of Trinidad by Mohammad Mustafa Abu Al Hassan, a painter and multimedia recycled materials collage artist in Kassala, Sudan.

 

Trinidad Escobar is an upāsikā and poet-seer. she practices engaged dhamma through art and anukampa mentorship for disabled, neurodivergent, low-income, formerly incarcerated, and homeless artists who serve their respective communities. her forthcoming graphic novel Of Sea and Venom (2028) will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers.

upāsikā Trinidad is Autistic and her special interests include spirituality directed towards Awakening, social and environmental justice, as well as communicating with pretas, nagas, asuras, and devas.

 
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
”
— Kahlil Gibran, The Madman, 1918

An adoptee from a peasant fisherman family, she dedicates her efforts to the many people of the global south who shape her life: the working class and the poor including her own family, the homeless, the incarcerated, the Philippines, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, and the Congo (DRC). Upasika Trinidad has made comics with homeless and incarcerated communities, disabled families affected by forced separation and adoption, LGBTQ youth and BIPOC Queer parents, Queer elders, and many other groups of people that are integral parts of her world.

“Tayo gumagawang himala, Tayo gumagawa ng mga sumpa, at ng mga Diyos!
(We make miracles, we make curses, we make Gods)
”

— Belinda Villas, 11 years old, 1966, Apparitions of Cabra Islet, Philippines

Cover art by Trinidad Escobar for a poem-comic called “High Voltage”, interior art by Malaya Tuyay.

Page 01 of “High Voltage” by Malaya Tuyay and Trinidad Escobar

Page 02 of “High Voltage” by Malaya Tuyay and Trinidad Escobar

“Read the book of the heart.”
— The Venerable Ajahn Chah
 

As a former professional cartoonist who combined Tantra with social justice efforts, Trinidad made journalism comics, funnies, Queer erotica comics, poetry-comics, book covers, spiritual murals and tattoo designs, and more.

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

Spiritual Teachers

“Like a bee seeking nectar from all kinds of flowers, seek teachings everywhere.”

— Dzogchen Teaching

Upasika Trinidad is self-taught in Tantra and spirit communication, and considers herself to be a part of Buddhist and gnostic traditions. The spiritual support she sought in life came from the lives, sermons, oral storytelling, and writings of: The Blessed Teacher Shakyamuni Buddha, his monastic disciples Śāriputra and Moggallāna, his leading Bhikkhunī disciples Mahāpajāpati Gotami, Khemā Therī and Uppalavannā Therī, his foremost lay disciples Sujātā Seniyadhītā and Kālī of Kuraraghara; the Serpent Buddha Nagarjuna, the poet and Mahasiddha Shantideva, the Lotus Born Padmasambhava, the Ocean of Knowledge Yeshe Tsogyal, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, the Venerable Gyatrul Rinpoche; Sufi and Bhakti poets like Rumi and Mirabai; Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi; teachers of Mahayana and Zen like Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh; Theravada researcher-monastics like the Venerables Bhikkhu Anālayo and Bhikkhu Bodhi; teachers of Dhutanga Kammaṭṭhāna traditions like the Venerables Ajahn Mun, Ajahn Chah, Ajahn Sumedho and other Forest teachers like Ajahn Buddhadasa, Upasika Kee Nanayon, Mae Chee Kaew from Thailand, Venerable Katukurunde Ñāṇananda Thera from Sri Lanka; the Venerable Acharya Buddharakkhita from India; teachers of Sanatana Dharma traditions including the father of Yoga Patanjali and the lay followers of Saint Bamakhepa, Saint Sai Baba, Saint Anandamayi Ma.

Upasika Trinidad hopes to expand Engaged Dhamma, contemplative art, and folk tantra in poor communities in California and Bataan, Philippines.

Cover by Trinidad Escobar for Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives, Edited by Eleanor Ty, October 2022.

 

Extended Bio of Former Life: Artist Publications & Community Projects


Trinidad has exhibited her art at prestigious institutions like the Palazzo Merulana Museum in Rome, Italy, The Society of Illustrators in New York, U.S.A., and The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Her comics have been published in the Philippines, Japan, the Netherlands, U.S.A., Canada, Greece, and Lebanon. Her comic books include CRUSHED (2018), Ode to Keisha written by Jamila Rowser (2021), Arrive In My Hands (2022), and dozens of underground alternative comics and zines like Most Intimate Friend (2020), Summon & Stir (2021) and Liwanag v.3 (2023).

Art Teachers

Trinidad studied with some of her dream mentors. She earned her B.A. degree in Poetry from San Francisco State University where she was a mentee of the poet Camille Dungy. There, she also studied with poets Truong Tran and Steve Dickison at the San Francisco Poetry Center. She then studied under M. Evelina Galang at the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) artist workshop and Lynda Barry at her cartoonist workshops. She earned her M.F.A. in Comics from California College of the Arts where she studied under Matt Silady and the cartoonists Thi Bui, John Jennings, and Justin Hall. Before pursuing her life in comics she studied spiritual poetry at the Buddhist arts college Naropa University. She is a fellow of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her most critical artist education comes from nature itself, solitary meditation, guros and mystics hidden amongst the homeless and disabled populations within the U.S. empire.

Trinidad’s adoptive father is her greatest cartooning inspiration. He used to cut out comic strips from the local newspaper and leave them on a table for her to read every Sunday morning. She would take her favorite funnies and pin them to her wall. The pure joy of sharing and reading comics with her adoptive father led to a lifelong love and respect for comics. Their shared favorites were The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder, Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Waterson, and The Farside Gallery by Gary Larson.

Trinidad’s adoptive mother read comics as a young immigrant to help herself learn English when she moved to the United States. Adore was also a lover of thriller books and erotica. She had boxes and boxes filled with books. This led to Trinidad’s obsession with collecting books. Trinidad now has over 3,000 books in her personal library including rare books of poetry and the occult. Trinidad is a regular donor to prison literature projects. She ships large quantities of her books to juvenile detention centers and prison libraries in California starting with San Quentin.

Trinidad’s birth parents are indigenous Waray. Generations of the family were made poor from years of colonization, displacement, political greed, war, and climate change. They could not read; they had to drop out of elementary school in order to support their own parents. As adults, they were made so desperate by martial law in the Philippines that they had no choice but to send Trinidad to live in the United States. They believed that doing this would prevent her from ever facing hunger. Their dream for her was to complete her schooling. The inequality that directly affected Trinidad’s early life led to a lifelong loyalty to the people of the global south and to sacred community education.

The cartoonists who have influenced her the most are Joe Sacco and Lynda Barry. The poets who have influenced her the most are Rumi, Mirabai, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, and Li-Young Lee.

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 2028.

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.

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

Before becoming a renunciate, Trinidad enjoyed studying the transdisciplinary fields of sociology and philosophy; systems theory and geopolitics; cosmology and eschatology; and esoteric, arcane, indigenous folk anarcho-spirituality. 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 continued her work as a popular education and contemplative arts teacher in partnership with community organizations like the Queer Ancestors Project.

Hilltop is a San Francisco high school for young parents. This is a cover that Trinidad made for one of their poetry anthologies.

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.

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.

“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: 

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.

Cover of Drawing Power, published by Abrams

Her comics journalism has been featured in The Nib, The Washington Post, Making Nonfiction Comics (Abrams), and many local community publications across California. 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 illustrations and mini comics appear in anthologies and art collections like Theater of Terror published by Northwest Press. She also publishes explicit prose and illustrated erotica under pen names. Her erotica is a direct challenge to the misogynistic depictions of women’s bodies and sexualities in popular media.

Favorites!

Her most treasured projects include making: community poetry writing workshops with formerly incarcerated men in San Francisco including collaborative workshops with organizations like United Playaz, a community mural program for formerly incarcerated men in partnership with the Oakland Peace Center; a mural for the East Bay Meditation Center; illustrations for a memoir project by Faith Adiele, Thailand’s first ordained Black Buddhist nun; 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; artwork for teen parents at Hilltop School in San Francisco; and a community mural commemorating the Pilipino Farm Workers, like Philip Vera Cruz, that hangs in the teen center in her hometown library.

Two of Trinidad’s favorite exhibits were Pinoy Power! at The Cartoon Art Museum where she was featured alongside her Pilipino cartoonist heroes, and her debut painting exhibit at Blackball Universe curated by Fantastic Negrito in Oakland, California.

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. During these years she was also active in the Prisoner’s Lit Project in Berkeley and she collected books for Books for the Barrio in the Philippines. 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.

She no longer participates in public speaking except for private meetings with other neurodivergent artists and students. She lives a deeply spiritual life with her animals and her Autistic family.

 
Dana