I didn't set out to become an artist — I became one because I needed a way to hold what I was carrying: a childhood split between Chicago's Little Village and summers in Mexico, and everything that comes with living between two cultures, two languages, two ways of seeing.

My paintings and my poems come from the same place. I don't think of them as separate practices. A haiku can start a painting; a painting can leave me with a line I have to write down. Nature, dreams, the spirit world, the music and graphic traditions I grew up around — they all show up in both.

For more than three decades, my work has also lived outside the studio — in classrooms, in community spaces, and since 2014, inside men's prisons in Jackson and Ionia and the juvenile detention center in Lansing, where I lead what's grown into the MSU Incarcerated Arts program: art, poetry, music, and yoga sessions built together with students, incarcerated people, and facility staff. That work has shaped how I think about why any of this matters.

I am not saying art will save you. But as humans, we need hope to survive and thrive. Art is hope. And hope allows us to imagine something better for ourselves and the world.