Carving through wood, painting, and carefully placing grain into place to depict whole worlds of Black and African people, Prince De León is an artist who spends her time making art as a labor of love and a conversation with self. Together, the two of us revisit some of the most fruitful places in Philadelphia, a city that lives so fully in both of our hearts, and I got to learn about her art making process as a Liberian artist whose evolution, as a human, is solely connected to her art.

We sit with a very important early work of hers--a piece called "African Booty Scratcher"--inspired by the book "Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto" by Legacy Russel, and influenced by Basquiat's style of self-portrait. As artists who speak from a place of truth and memory, it felt good to be in conversation with someone whose art making process is a dance with identity and memory; someone who can understand the inner workings imbedded into such a way of making.

What would I do if I couldn't fail? This is the question I've come to ponder and dwell after this conversation.

Jhelan Gordon-Salaam is a choreographer, movement artist, teacher, fellow deep feeler, and fellow reader who I've gotten the chance to meet during my time spent in Philadelphia. The two of us go beneath the surface and comb through the ways in which Dance has infused itself into our personal worlds and even return to the earlier tender places where it all began.

With our very different experiences and timelines, we both come together to provide each other with perspective and support in reclaiming what our journeys mean, and sift through the different lenses that the art form provides.

Explicitly candid about healing the inner child through writing, Mark and I comb through these processes and revisit their journeys of how their many novels have been shaped by experience.

Mark Oshiro is a #1 NY Times Bestselling Author of The Sun and the Star: A Nico Di Angelo Adventure, and award winning novelist of YA and middle grade books Such as: Anger is a Gift, Into the Light, Each of us a Desert, and many more.

Specifically, we recall the process and life experiences that infused these two novels in particular: Into the Light, and Anger is a Gift.

Having spent time talking to students in Oakland about their experiences in the school system, Mark wrote Anger is a Gift as a way of doing justice to telling their stories authentically, whilst infusing some of their own personal connection to the world through certain characters in the story.

Into the Light became a much more fiction/biographical story, once Mark became ready to truly share the depths of their own life experiences as a person who grew up in the foster care system, and had experience with strictly religious people who swore against queerness.

All of this has led to many of these stories being written, and now, Mark and I get to comb through it all. Reading Mark’s work in summer of 2023, I knew that one day I would want to talk to this person about their art, especially as a queer writer myself who makes it a point to face my experiences through my writing.

I hope there’s something in here for you.