“I am a nurse first.”
That’s how Ashley Van-De-Cruize Lampkin ends almost every conversation about her creative work. Not as a disclaimer as a point of pride.
Because everything she’s built as a storyteller grew directly out of the thing she does when the comics are closed and the pen is down: showing up for patients in underserved communities in Los Angeles as a registered nurse, shift after shift, for years.
And yet, in between those shifts, she has written a romance mystery novel, two poetry collections, launched a supernatural comic book with a Black female lead, and is now developing that comic into an animated series.
She recently added a new digital comic series, Storytime: The Caribbean Is in Africa!, to the catalogue. She has nearly half a million followers across her social platforms. And she’s still in the middle of her Master’s degree in Nursing.
If you’re asking how the answer, as it turns out, is exactly what makes her work worth paying attention to.
The creative DNA starts in Brooklyn. Ashley was born and raised in a Caribbean household, her mother and grandmother Trinidadian immigrants who navigated America with the kind of quiet, unshakeable resilience that Ashley has described as the most profound influence on her life and work.
Growing up watching them move through a country that wasn’t built for them, she found herself doing what most creative kids do: processing it all through story. The humor of being a young Black American girl with immigrant parents. The cultural code-switching.
The food, the language, the expectations, the love. All of it became material first in her head, then on social media, then eventually on the page.
“So many of my stories are devoted to the humor found in being a young Black American woman while simultaneously growing up with immigrant parents in America.” — Ashley Van-De-Cruize Lampkin
That cultural specificity, Caribbean family dynamics, immigrant resilience, the specific absurdity of growing up between two worlds is what makes her storytelling land. It’s not generic.
It’s rooted. And rootedness, in any creative medium, is what makes audiences feel seen.
When Ashley and her husband Blake moved to California, they found their escape from the emotional weight of nursing the same way a lot of creatives do: deep in anime and comics.
She’s watched Avatar: The Last Airbender at least fifteen times. Not as background noise as study. Each rewatch at different life stages teaching her something different about narrative, character, and the weight of inherited power.
That obsession eventually became Na Makasi: The Discovery (Ancestral Awakening) her debut comic book, co-built with Blake and released in early 2025.
The story follows Anaya, a young Black woman of African and Japanese descent, whose life is shattered by betrayal and who discovers in that wreckage that she has abilities: mind-reading, telekinesis, the power to freeze time.
What begins as a supernatural origin story quickly deepens into something richer: a narrative about inherited power, ancestry, family secrets, and a centuries-old conflict that Anaya never asked to be part of but cannot escape.
Guided by a mysterious figure called the Shadow, she must rescue her sister, uncover the truth about her lineage, and figure out who she actually is beneath everything that’s been done to her.
The tagline says it all: “Betrayed by Blood. Hunted for Power. Destined for War.”
She is currently working on Issue 2 and developing Na Makasi into an animated series, which, given the Avatar influence baked into its DNA and the quality of its supernatural world-building, is the kind of project the animation community should be watching closely.
Running parallel to Na Makasi is her newest project, Storytime: The Caribbean Is in Africa?! a digital comic series that does something genuinely different with the hospital setting.
Where most nurse-centred content leans into either medical drama or trauma, Ashley’s Storytime series leans into comedy.
The chaos, the unexpected moments, the absurdity of being a human being in one of the most high-pressure, emotionally intense work environments on the planet she turns all of it into something that makes nurses laugh and makes non-nurses finally understand what the job is actually like.
“I chose the comic route because I wanted nursing to feel fun again. There are so many sides to this profession, but one of the best parts is being able to laugh with people who truly understand what you’ve been through.”
The title itself, The Caribbean is in Africa?! is peak Ashley. It’s the kind of line that only makes sense if you grew up hearing Caribbean relatives make declarations about history and identity with absolute confidence and zero context.
If you know, you know. And if you don’t know, you’re about to find out.
Crucially, Ashley built the entire series around a framework of ethical storytelling changing nonessential details, never identifying patients or facilities, letting time pass before any real experience becomes page content.
Stories that couldn’t be protected stayed off the page entirely. It’s a model that any creator drawing from real professional experience whether in healthcare, law, education, or any other field can learn from.
She didn’t launch a comic book first. She didn’t start with a Kickstarter. She started by sitting in front of a camera and telling stories.
Caribbean family stories. Hospital stories. The specific, textured, hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking stories of her life. Her logic was simple and exact: if she could convince people on social media that she was a great storyteller, it wouldn’t be as hard to market a book.
That was five years ago. She now has close to 500,000 followers across platforms, built entirely on storytelling, not aesthetics or trends or posting schedules.
Just story. Just her voice. Just the specific, irreplaceable texture of her particular experience.
When asked what she’d do differently, she said she’d move slower.
“Taking my time would have likely gotten me here faster. Slow-and-steady truly does win the race.” — Ashley on CanvasRebel
That’s not inspirational filler. That’s a creator who bulldozed through projects that needed more time and learned the hard way that patience and process are not the enemy of ambition they’re what make ambition sustainable.
Ashley Van-De-Cruize Lampkin’s creative catalogue right now:
- Na Makasi: The Discovery (Ancestral Awakening) — supernatural comic book, Issue 1 available now, Issue 2 in development, animated series in development
- Storytime: The Caribbean Is in Africa?! — new digital comic series, Issue 1 out now
- Confident Sensuality — romance mystery novel, first published 2021, rebranded 2024
- Love Never Fails — poetry collection
- Letters to Ocean — poetry collection
- Estranged Diseases — a nurse-led educational course on misunderstood and misdiagnosed conditions
She’s also currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Nursing. Because apparently sleep is optional when the creative output is this consistent.
Ashley Van-De-Cruize Lampkin is the kind of creator who doesn’t fit cleanly into one category and that’s exactly the point. A nurse who writes comics. A Caribbean storyteller building supernatural worlds.
A poet who turned social media into a publishing runway. A creator who understands that the best material is already in your life, you just have to be brave enough, and patient enough, to turn it into something.
Follow Ashley’s work on Instagram @na_makasi_comic_book and get your copy of Na Makasi on Amazon.