Nahshon D. Anderson: Don’t Just Black Out Now; Support Queer & Trans Writers of Color

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The recent unlawful killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other African-Americans and 40+ emails since that I’ve received from different nonprofits stating solidarity for Black Lives led me to write this.

Many organizations are now claiming to support Black people (because it’s currently convenient) and believe they are standing in solidarity with us (even as they obtain more funding and media attention since it’s currently convenient).

Yet Queer writers of color have been overlooked and under-funded for decades, especially Trans writers of color (i.e. transgender writers of color).


When it’s come time to cut checks, much of our literature hasn’t been worth bothering for. Many manuscripts, submissions, and more have been left on the curb without hope. In my own work, focusing my subject matter on social justice, economic inequality and police brutality is my form of protest.

Last December, I submitted chapter four of my unpublished memoir Shooting Range, titled “This is for Rodney King,” into a literary competition. I did not expect to win, nor did I expect to lose. I just went for it.

Over the years, in addition to my writing, I’ve also served as panelist for various arts organizations and awards and have been shocked at the absence of a relevant narrative examining police brutality in general and honoring people like Rodney Glen King. Police brutality has been an ongoing issue for years that’s only gotten worse, and Mr. George Floyd’s and Ms. Breonna Taylor’s deaths are only the latest proof. This is what made my submission to the contest, which was dedicated to honoring Rodney Glen King, important for more publications to support. But the piece was rejected.

I was going to remain quiet about not receiving the award for my submission. But when not long afterwards I received an email from the same organization behind the contest about its newly awakened principles and commitment to Black Lives, I was left shaking my head, tired of reading the same bullshit.

However, there are organizations out there committed to walking the walk. To name one example, Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization focused on the empowerment and expansion of literature by queer writers of color, is holding an excellent fundraiser that still needs help reaching its goal of $100,000 to support queer and trans lives.

Do you mind digging in your purse to support Shade Literary Arts, or do you need my help?


Moving forward, I hope nonprofits and arts organizations across the U.S. are sincere in their newfound solidarity statements, even if I know they’re only manufacturing them based on current events, which by the way all read as if they were written by the same person(s).

I also hope that future grant awards reflect diversity instead of it being just another “trendy” bandwagon. This change is long, long, long, long overdue.

N.D.A. aka K.I.N.A.

Nahshon Dion is a multi-talented, award-winning creative nonfiction writer, teaching artist, creative director, event producer, and arts patron from Pasadena, California. In June 1996, she met rapper Tupac Shakur and interned at his film production company, Look Hear Sound & Vision. Nahshon’s literature speaks to discrimination and violence many Black and Brown youth face. She has been published in several anthologies and literary journals. Since 2013, she’s received dozens of grants, fellowships, artist residencies, honors, and awards, from across the nation monetarily, totaling over $210,000 that provided ammunition and support for developing her forthcoming untitled memoir. Nahshon’s existence and resilience show how marginalized youth can reach their full potential and shine with dignity when their rainbow is blurred. 

In 2020, Nahshon was interviewed by writer Sheldon Pearce for Changes: An Oral History of Tupac (Simon & Schuster). In 2021, Nahshon and talent manager Leila Steinberg hosted Tupac Shakur’s 50th birthday celebration and a 25th-anniversary death tribute. As a grant writer for over a decade, Nahshon has paid it forward by voluntarily assisting dozens of artists and entrepreneurs across the nation with obtaining tens of thousands of dollars in grants and funding. She also produces and hosts a weekly hour entertaining chat titled TRANSBRATIONS on Youtube. “It’s such a good transbration! It’s such a sweet sensation!”

Calling All Bloggers, Writers, Storytellers: Publish Your Voice on Jimbo Times: The L.A. Storyteller

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It’s true.

“After five years of JIMBO TIMES: The L.A. Storyteller, it’s time to make space on the blog for more voices and stories from communities in Los Angeles and beyond. Enter the new Submissions feature. To maintain and expand the blog’s love for city life and attention to its working class communities, here are the types of pieces writers everywhere are encouraged to submit…”

I’m very proud of this latest milestone for the site, and thereby look forward to seeing what types of stories we’ll be getting out there! Visit the new SUBMISSIONS page soon to go and see for yourself!

J.T.

Helena Maria Viramontes: Their Dogs Came With Them (2006)

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‘L.A.’ in 2018 is a city of over 10 million people by the last estimate, and in several other ways significantly bigger than what it was in the 1970s, when Viramontes was a teenager through its avenues and boulevards picking up the fulcrum on which her novel rests.

Yet a glance at L.A. then reveals a world not radically different from the one which appears to be on the brink of collapse today, particularly for urban youth in the city: the Vietnam war raged on, while at the same time the 1965 Watts Riots left the city in a state of racial insecurity and opposition to the police state; simultaneously, Black and Brown communities increasingly found heroin and other drugs infiltrating their neighborhoods, while at L.A.’s schools and California’s universities, institutional racism spawned further battle lines for the sunshine state; on the east sides of Los Angeles especially, bitter memories of the erection of L.A.’s freeways in the early 1960s left communities there weary of the city’s urban development; and not far along, youth ‘delinquency’ and incarceration marked the outset of a prison industrial complex that nearly fifty years later our communities are still mired in.

These are the living nightmares of what was then still a newly modernizing world which inspired the heroine that is the amazing Viramontes. Her literary gifts unwind similarly to a nightmare, or as genuine superpowers around the mind of the reader for immersing us like veins into bodies of suffering deviating from the wake of an uprooted Los Angeles. In Their Dogs Came With Them, the micro-histories that make up the city are given life on the literary big screen, where they shine like a golden Pontiac, roaring with desire and pulling all in their midst to the edge of what might be possible with just enough forgetting, even as total forgetting is never quite possible.

In the opening chapters of the book, we meet Ermila, along with her Grandmother, the latter of whom is haunted by memories of a life in fear, anxiety, and racial hostility in L.A.:

“A bespectacled Grandmother didn’t see the child lift the box to show off her award. The sunlight scarred her vision, and Grandmother couldn’t quite discern the child holding on to Miss Eastman except for the white teeth of the teacher talking to the child as they walked the dark corridor to meet her. Grandmother had watched the escalating heat rising each and every day, the glass thermometer bursting, its red mercury spreading infectious green-tinted rage. Miss Eastman grew larger and darker, and the child swung her pink gift in the shaded hollowness of the corridor. No longer immunized, Grandmother knew it was only a matter of time before the roaming packs of Negroes would claw out of the television’s own green guts, riot-rushing to lift and overturn cars and set fire to all the neighborhood had worked for, to anything flammable on the living side of First Street. Though the teacher passed the child over to Grandmother tenderly, Miss Eastman appeared so black, she was green.”

Grandmother, who is the only caretaker in her granddaughter’s life, also speaks to the apprehension–or Americanization–of the time, which, much like today, was dominated by the mystical spell of late night news, albeit through the color or green televisions that were just making their way into so many living rooms. And while we never learn much about Grandmother’s own childhood, she’s a woman many readers will recognize right away, as are each of the novel’s figures in its surreal sequence of events.

Memory ‘lapses’ form major parts of each character’s time with us, making for a surreal timeline that moves through Their Dogs, but a few themes stand out most consistently for this reader: Viramontes’s work is deeply concerned with upbringing and the burdens placed on youth coming of age in a world that at many turns appears to be dis-invested in their humanity, and which at others appears to be teeming with life so palpable it can’t simply be passed over as anything but extraordinary. Ermila, who is probably the novel’s second most rebellious figure, carries this most naturally:

“She collected observations as one would collect ice-cream sticks: a youth riding a wobbly bike on the muddy shoulders of the street; a skinny cat roaming through the tall bird-of-paradise stalks; two comadres chatting between a fence; an old crooked bird man who fed his flock of pigeons daily. The desire to be on the other side of the fence, to run away and join them, was so strong, it startled her.”

There is also, no matter how much a reader might hope for the novel to do otherwise, a refusal to let go of the traumas which turn youth from hand-held creatures brimming with the future in their eyes into unintelligible monsters weighed down by their pasts, depending on which side we meet their glances from; a heartbreaking memory from arguably the novel’s most compelling figure, “Turtle,” demonstrates this clearly:

“Tio Angel lunged at his brother Frank, and after the bump and break of furniture, the fall and jingle of Christmas tree, the grind and gravel of glass shards, Turtle heard the screen door screech open. Turtle dug her fingertips underneath some shingles, terrified of falling, and she peered over the roof’s edge and saw how awkwardly the scuffling shadows flew into the nopales.”

Each page through the novel is filled with piercing uses of language such as this, at times nearly unbearable to digest. But just when violence threatens to steal the show, Viramontes follows with paragraphs that are simply mystical and delicious concoctions of sounds for readers to sift through, reminiscent of the late great Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, though with a voice distinguished by the duality of a young woman both trapped and liberated by femininity and age. When Ermila and her girlfriends mightily get back at an ex of hers after their recent breakup, for example, they smuggle their teenage glee for the more adult-like professionalism over the affair, driving the sequence through with a galvanizing energy to dwell in:

“And just as they had converged, they pulled away in opposite directions slowly, sluggishly lest they call attention to themselves, not rushing to leave the scene of the crime, though it was a difficult task not to explode adrenaline all over the place. They had to silence the forcefulness of their delight, hesitating to acknowledge one another’s glances. They strolled away in separate directions, carrying the flakes of metallic paint, bluish palms, the color of yams on their hands, barely containing their collective sense of invincibility. Whatever laughter or disbelief, whatever overblown nerves Ermila had suppressed, now raised her spirit to the point that her steps felt buoyant and she felt an enormous craving for adventure.”

These are the lines which make the novel not just a reflection on childhood, but a dream through the thin space between actuality and imagination, like the gravity that separates us from the stars only physically, but not in our fantasies. And they are the micro-histories and maybe even sub-atomic histories that Viramontes unravels with such mastery for a novel so gorgeous it contains something for everyone. What is the best literature, after all, if not an expression for the whole world and all of humanity to observe together, opposite of one another, and more. In Ben, whose character haunts the novel’s trajectory more than engaging with it directly, any reader who’s ever felt a tinge of uncertainty at simply “going with the flow” will relate:

“Thank you, he said. Being late for class, Ben said he’d better get going because seats became scarce in his Intro Soc class. But the young woman shouted to his back, A gift for you, hermano. And then ran up to him, removed her beret and placed it on his head. And at that instance when he looked directly into her eyes, Ben would’ve given his life to walk upright without hobbling, to push his chest out, to brave the mental eye of the tornado and be absorbed by something larger. The woman cocked her head to read his stunned expression, and he turned to mask it. His leg plagued him like his fear. He resisted being lifted up into a gathering mass of swirling political storms. He refused to be clearly defined as Chicano, and for that, he refused to belong to a fluid movement, joining her, joining them, joining other Chicanos to become a part, to become a whole and not just stay forever in between.”

I am unmistakably shaken by Viramontes’s astounding historical prose and document, which ultimately erupts into a brilliant crescendo or joyride through Los Angeles with her characters no matter how dark the space. Even before the uncanny finale, however, each moment in the novel is a memory mixed with a wish, an ode to friends and members of her community across the ages; our people thus become one and the same; and our struggle to look beyond Los Angeles’s smog and out towards the night sky in hopes of better days, a ritual encompassing every last one of us.

Their Dogs Came With Them is an achievement for literary aficionados, artists, scholars, and witnesses of all kinds everywhere. And from this day forward, the book is not just with JIMBO TIMES, but it’s embedded into our reading’s subatomic consciousness. With each new young reader we get to meet, then, we’ll be sending this book their way. Nuestro Pueblo will know Viramontes’s name.

J.T.

It’s Been Ten Years of Writing in Los Angeles

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Marveling at the Times; Spring 2018

It was ten years ago that I found myself at home in the living room wondering desperately about what the future held for me. I was seventeen years old, just graduated from high school, and anxious to get through the summer ahead of me. I felt terribly alone, disassociated from the friends that I’d known, and unsure about how on earth I’d get through the high temperatures that dominated so many of the days from the early hours of the morning into the evening.

Then one day through the heat, I sat myself before the desktop we’d had in the living room at the time, opened a blank document, and began to write, etching the heat I felt on my back onto the screen for the record to see. I wrote like hell that summer, and the results were strange, not in an ominous way, but in an altogether new and mysterious way. What I saw reflected on the screen was somehow alive, even if ‘frozen’ in time. It was myself, like some other half from an alternate universe, staring right back at me through the page.

I remember that I was reading a lot of Philip K. Dick at the time, which made it so that my mind was especially warped, and which came off in my entries to the page–a lot of existential identity stuff. But I also remember that since I still had a bit of HTML programming fresh in my mind, after a few sessions of writing on the desktop I decided that I couldn’t keep my texts on just any ole blank document; I had to design a proper little website for them all.

So I put together the fonts and their sizes, downloaded some cool images for background off the web, activated the links, and launched it. I would name the private little website that I’d come away with through this process Revolt Radio (RR).

There were three main components of RR, that is, in terms of the writing that would make its way through it.

First, there was the Current page, which functioned like a stream for all of the miscellaneous thoughts or ‘summaries’ of the days I had, and which thereby filled up the fastest.

Second, there was the Poems page, where I hid all of my hymns, letters, and other ‘confessions’ I could never muster up the courage to publish for any eyes other than my own.

Finally, there was the Stories page, where I stored all of my ‘science-fiction’ writing, based loosely on none other than yours truly, but also on the accounts I’d heard from my peers back at Marshall.

Even at seventeen, a part of me wanted to write something of an autobiography, but because at the same time I also aspired to be a sci-fi writer like the great PKD himself, my Stories page featured tales both on a personal level as well as on more abstract terms, although the latter was just a ‘stranger’ version of the former.

In turn, Revolt Radio got me through that first summer out of high school, its pages receiving worlds that I couldn’t even begin to describe to anyone else. The pages didn’t judge me for what those worlds contained or what they lacked, nor did they disappoint me, or demand anything of me at all.

The pages were acceptance in its purest form, but filling them up was also a matter of survival; in writing my heart out I made it clear that I wouldn’t allow the world just to pass me by. Then, in seeing my words put together like those of the novels by famous authors which I’d hold in my hands, I had proof that my beliefs were also more than just feelings, but articles with their own lives which could stare right back at me unafraid.

I treasured the little alternate universe of Revolt Radio so much that for the next six years, I would continue writing through the site, making and remaking its pages until the time came for me to culminate onto other platforms.

Today, I’ve got another little set of pages, which are public, but even now I look back at that frightening little summer from ten years ago with tremendous gratitude for spawning RR, the site; in staring at me now as vividly as they did ten years ago, the pages make me all the more fearless for what’s in front of me in the days to come.

If we’re fortunate enough, to another ten years Los Angeles,

J.T.

Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1997)

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I’m a child of the nineties, so maybe that explains why I seem to be so fascinated with so much of the literature from the period.

Or maybe it’s just that what so many writers published during the nineties comes off the pages as being directly related to general discussions about law and order today.

To be sure, Mona Ruiz’s Two Badges informs the idea of law and order from a rare and critical position; inspired by the author’s own life, the book is an autobiographical foray into the world of a former gang member turned police officer in her ‘old’ neighborhood.

If it sounds like a strange concept, the author is more than well aware of it. In the introduction to Badges, Ruiz describes the process for her:

“Talking about my past, my barrio and the circle of friends is difficult because there has been so much pain and loss. For many of them, the fact that I wear a police uniform now is a betrayal of sorts. I hope that this book will help them understand that I have never turned my back on the past–just the opposite, I believe I have dedicated my life to facing and dealing with it. I never left my barrio, I never ran away. I stayed and I’m trying to make a difference.”


The excerpt hits close to home, capturing perfectly the sense of survivor’s guilt that faces so many who feel they ‘escaped’ from a certain tragedy while their counterparts ‘stayed behind’.

In the case of Mona Ruiz’s life, the tragedy is the cycle of drug addiction and incarceration that demeans and disfigures her immediate circle of friends, and later, their children.

There is a second tragedy, however. If Ruiz was fortunate enough to ‘escape’ the cycle, it’s figuratively and literally a blessing in disguise, as she takes on a uniform which many would argue plays an unforgivable role in the execution of the cycle.

Ruiz doesn’t preach to the reader about which side has the right, though. Instead, she speaks purely about how role-switching since her youth informs her adulthood on unforgettable terms, as if it all happened in a single day:

“…The makeup made us feel older. The mask smoothed away signs of weakness and gave us power. When I was a teen, it was a sign that I belonged to the streets. At age thirty-two, staring into the peeling mirror in the locker room at the police station, it was a disguise, a way to hide my badge and my job. I couldn’t pretend, though, that I wasn’t feeling strange seeing myself in the war paint again. Behind my busy hands, I saw the face of my past staring at me in that mirror.”


For its vivid sense of introspection, Ruiz’s passage brings to mind just how often ‘the mask’ is being donned. That is, just when does the make-up begin for a person, and at what point does it end?

Moreover, in the twenty-first century, who isn’t putting on a mask to get through the day? For Ruiz, putting on the mask in her teens is a rite of passage, or the first step of claiming her face in the world for power. But later as a police officer, the disguising continues rather than letting up, a sign that human beings sort of never stop growing up.

As Two Badges goes on though, it’s clear that Ruiz isn’t interested in playing for power as much as she’s interested in healing from the consequences of so much time with the game. There is also a third major challenge facing her as a woman: at home, when the badge is off, she’s the wife of a jealous husband and mother of two.

Even after everything, then, the mask-donning and fighting continues for her, and I can only imagine how exhausting it was for Ruiz to not only survive all of this, but to then place it into perspective and sit down to write about it.

For this, apart from the fascinating insights the book offers to the discussion of law and order, Two Badges also demonstrates how even though great writing takes incredible amounts of time, when done truthfully and unapologetically, the result is vividly poignant.

In turn, The Lives of Mona Ruiz get a badge of raucous approval from The L.A. Storyteller. And as a matter of appreciating the book so much, a couple of months ago I had the privilege to share an excerpt of the book with a group of young writers through the I.O.W. program.

Ruiz’s writing did not earn unanimous badges of approval from the youth, but it did inspire a lively array of opinions; I can assure anyone looking to engage their own group of youngsters that Mona Ruiz’s book will come through for you all the same.

J.T.