The about page. The home signal. The frequencies that built me.

僕の名は Michael Peña. Me llaman Maikito en casa, Marion/Mari with the homies, Mike at the infusion center, Microwavey when I’m cooking, and Wavey on the byline. Six names, one signal. El único trilingüe matatán.

I was born at Sloan Kettering and raised between Dyckman Street and Baní, Peravia. My güela Luz taught me what a flag means before anyone ever showed me a Jolly Roger. My summers were Dominican and my school years were New York public—Bronx Science, Hunter, the kind of education where the real syllabus was the train ride home with a borrowed library book and a Game Boy.

I work in oncology pharmacy. Sterile compounding, IV bags, the kind of room where the math has to be right because the patient is waiting. That’s the day job, and I take it seriously the same way I take this seriously: people are on the other end of what I make.

The night job—this job—is paying attention. I write for Manga Mavericks, ComicsBeat, and Toonami Faithful. I cover anime, manga, comics, hip-hop, Pokémon, LitRPG, and the long tail of internet fan culture that raised a generation of us who learned criticism from forum signatures before we ever heard the word criticism. Wavey Culture is where I do the work that’s mine: the long essays, the Sunday column, the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else because it wasn’t supposed to.

The reading list that made me: My Side of the Mountain in fourth grade taught me that a kid alone with his attention is already a writer. The Autobiography of Malcolm X in seventh grade taught me a life can be testimony. East of Eden senior year taught me that a sentence can carry a whole inheritance. Sophomore year of college I read Paradise Lost and Passing back to back and learned that the most dangerous question in literature is who gets to be seen as themselves. Junior year I took creative writing and read Emily Dickinson and Junot Díaz in the same semester: a poet who built whole cosmologies inside a dash and a novelist who taught me that footnotes could be a form of love. Díaz is the one whose voice I keep finding in my own, the way you catch your father’s laugh coming out of your mouth.

What you’ll find here: reviews that take the source seriously, essays that take you seriously, and a Sunday column called DOMIN号 because I’m from Washington Heights and I read too much manga and the pun works in three languages, get at me.

Bienvenido. Pull up. 一生に読もうぜ。

Canto puro, por Wavey.