Articles by The Nasiona Team

BIPOC Music + Spoken Word Series

The Nasiona’s Black Is Beautiful Playlist

February 9, 2022 The Nasiona Team

With our BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL music playlist, we strive to center, elevate, and amplify the voices and musical talents of Black storytellers and creators. Curated by The Nasiona team, this introduction is more than a simple opportunity for you to learn and be entertained. No. Not just that. That’s a bonus. What we really hope you’ll do is commit to taking action to support these artists, purchase their music, share their work, use your influence and power to create access to opportunity, and become long-term patrons. We hope the playlist animates your body, inspires your soul, and moves your wallet. As we try to impact equity, one critical thing we can all do is buy and experience the works created and produced by Black artists. […]

BIPOC Music + Spoken Word Series

TRE. CHARLES: “Stressin.”

April 26, 2021 The Nasiona Team

World premiere of Tre. Charles’s debut single/music video for “Stressin.” Tre. Charles is a singer-songwriter who dives into the depths of his soul to try to bring you into his world with an expressive blend of warm and soulful undertones. This track embodies personal and social struggles that Tre. Charles has experienced throughout his life as a young Black man in America. This timely track and its visuals are sure to capture the isolation that many have felt through this pandemic. […]

No Picture
BIPOC Music + Spoken Word Series

Volume 1: Petrichor

February 28, 2021 The Nasiona Team

This first volume of The Nasiona’s music series encapsulates all the glorious highs and the searing lows of navigating the world as an empathetic, curious individual. The works contained in this volume — from mournful piano compositions, dazzling spoken word, spellbinding vocal layered-songs, to beautiful instrumentals — express the intricacies of being an artist of color in a too-often indifferent world; and like the scent that lingers long after the downpour, these masterpieces ask you to sit awhile, to close your eyes, to pay attention […]

Being Latina/e/o/x Series

Cruzando Fronteras / Crossing Borders

December 31, 2019 The Nasiona Team

Why would anyone want to take on the treacherous task of crossing (multiple) borders? Poets Alondra Adame, Eva Gonzalez, Gustavo Martir, David Cruz, and Diana Castellanos share their personal stories on crossing borders and immigration during “Cruzando Fronteras,” an event that provided a safe space to talk about the seeking of refuge. […]

Nasiona Books

Poems That Sneak Up and Disturb Your Equilibrium in the Best Possible Way: New Book, ‘PLACES & NAMES,’ by Carl Boon

June 4, 2019 The Nasiona Team

The poems in Carl Boon’s debut collection, PLACES & NAMES, coalesce two kinds of history—the factual and the imagined—to produce a kind of intimacy that is greater than either fact or imagination. It is this sense of intimacy that brings the poems to life. We encounter real places sometimes—places we see on maps and highway signs—but also places that exist only in the imagination. We encounter names that are both recognizable and almost—or barely—remembered at all: Robert E. Lee next to one of a thousand men named Jackson who went to fight in Vietnam; Jorge Luis Borges next to an unknown boy from Clarita, Oklahoma, who himself would become a poet someday; a man who wishes he were Rocky Marciano hammering the heavy bag in Northeast Ohio, hungry for more than beans or soup. And suddenly it becomes clear how intimately connected in this collection these places and names are as we range from Saigon to northern Iraq; Athens, Ohio, to Libya; Ankara to Pittsburgh; and a strange, sleepy place called Pomegranate Town where someone’s infant dozes in the back of a car on a seaside highway. The people who inhabit these places seem, in a sense, to become those places, inseparable from their geographies and histories, often unable to escape, bound by memory, nostalgia, and tradition. […]

Nasiona Books

What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?: New Book, ‘Vestiges of Courage,’ by Mireya S. Vela

April 19, 2019 The Nasiona Team

Vestiges of Courage is a collection of personal essays that explores inequities and injustice. Raised between two cultures and two languages, Mireya S. Vela discusses how the systems in her family and in society worked to create an abusive environment that felt crushing, confusing, and hopeless. In her book, Ms. Vela delineates her experience of living through sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. This book is much more than a collection of experiences, though. Ms. Vela wants to know how and why abuse thrived in her family. She digs deep to understand why these things happened and how she survived. […]

Eat The Eight, by Ron Sunog, MD
Nasiona Books

How to Navigate the Imperfect Art of Medicine and Prevent Food Allergy with Food: New Book, ‘Eat The Eight,’ by Ron Sunog, MD

April 17, 2019 The Nasiona Team

In 2015, after a landmark medical study proved that the early inclusion of peanut in the diet of infants prevents peanut allergy, Ron Sunog, MD, set out to develop a great first peanut food for infants. When most physicians and parents did not embrace this important new information, Dr. Sunog was determined to understand why. Eat The Eight examines how difficult it is to acquire and understand good medical evidence, the complex web of reason and emotion through which people filter medical information, and the imperative to thoughtfully temper the science of medicine with the art of medicine. Parents will learn how a healthful diet can be key to reducing their infant’s risk of developing food allergy. […]

Being Mixed-Race Series

What Does It Mean to Be Mixed-Race in the US?: New Book, ‘Mixed,’ by Nicole Zelniker

March 22, 2019 The Nasiona Team

The definition of families is widening, whether it’s because of mixed-race relationships, interracial adoption, or numerous other factors. Today, it is important to hear from a growing population about race, their shifting identities, and what family means to them. At the heart of the issue are the mixed-race families. Many mixed-race children have had difficulties fitting in, whether with one race or the other. In mixed-race relationships, one partner may face racism, while the other may not, or else they will experience racism in different ways. Children who have been adopted into families that identify as a race that is not theirs often find that they struggle to fit in with their families as well as with people who identify as their own race. Not only are these families navigating US American culture at large, but they also must navigate their own family structures and what it means to be mixed. […]

Blog

The Nasiona Literary Prize Winners

February 2, 2019 The Nasiona Team

With our literary contests, we look to identify and celebrate some of the best original, unpublished creative nonfiction and nonfiction poetry out there.

_The Nasiona Flash Creative Nonfiction Prize, 2019: Hannah Huff, “Finding Jean Palmer”

_The Nasiona Nonfiction Poetry Prize, 2019: Bunkong Tuon, “A Guide to Parenting” […]