Author Spotlight: Noel Quiñones

letraslatinasblog2
Jan 22
8 min read

ISBN 978-1-960327-20-8

You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?

The first line of my book is “What if I told you light is a marriage”

The last line of my book is “I hunt for the egg of color / I develop in the light.”

What type of poet do you classify yourself as?

I can’t ignore the sheer weight of my introduction to poetry, the life-shifting effect spoken word had on me as I witnessed Mayda Del Valle use her body and voice to embody her poem’s narrative. Curious as ever at 15 years old, I competed in my first poetry slam at the Bowery Poetry Club with Urban Word NYC. As poets shared, I turned to the crowd and saw faces engaged, in awe, moved. I spent the next 10 years trying to use the tools of the stage: voice, body, mic, lights, and space to move an audience. While many warned me that an MFA program would try to strip me of my spoken word background, I applied anyway, curious about how I could translate my skillset to the page.

What I found at the University of Mississippi was not only an acceptance of my spoken word acumen but an encouragement to bring my full self to the page. Spoken word had taught me to create engagement by immersing my audience in my cultural context, and later, by using implication to spark participation. I wanted to carry this over to the page. As I wrote Orange, I was guided by two questions: What are the boundaries of a reader’s participation and how can I use form to create interaction?

Orange uses forms where readers lift flaps, scratch off tinfoil, color in sections, connect dots, move chess pieces, and examine diagrams. These interactive elements demand active uncovering, completion, and rearrangement, mirroring my childhood experience navigating complex familial truths. While I couldn’t replicate my exact struggles in the reader, I could create a poetic form that required struggle. So, by linking the two together the reader participated in the making of meaning.

I used to call myself a spoken word poet, then a slam poet, then a poet. Others have called me an experimental poet, but I like to think of myself as an interactive poet.

What are some key themes present in your book?

Set in the North Bronx, Orange grapples with my parent’s ten-year divorce after my father came out and the blurry lines between friendship and romantic relationships. Across these poems I try to explore themes of contradiction, love, gender, religion, and community. My parent’s divorce was something that simultaneously broke my mother and freed my father. I associated queerness and religion with pain and heartbreak as well as with connection and joy. My father’s friends ushered him into a new life and my mother’s family supported her as she rebuilt her life. In my own childhood, I had friends who both saved my life and put me in danger, just like my family, yet I was told both that friends are chosen family and they will never be as important as family.

In Orange I try to learn from and lean into these contradictions, these complexities of love. My parent’s relationship, to each other, to me, to the Bronx, to God, was not black and white. Yet, my parents made arguments for good vs. bad, my church taught me that gay people would burn in hell, and my teachers said the Bronx was a terrible place that everyone should escape from. In my poems, I ask: How does one person’s truth relate to another’s? How do we account for harm? How do we love with & through complexity?

Did another art form influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc.

Color theory, the art and science of how color effects our human perception, is the biggest influence on, major scaffolding, and central lens through which I wrote and constructed Orange. Ever since I was a toddler, my favorite color has been orange but it wasn’t until my MFA that I finally asked myself, “What is the history of this color?” I read Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut’s The Secret Language of Color and was struck by this quote: “For millennia, orange was a color without an identity. In many languages, it’s one of the very last, if not the last, color named in the rainbow.” Cultural historian Kassia St. Clair, in her book The Secret Lives of Color, talks about a similar difficulty with orange. Since it wasn’t considered its own distinct color until relatively recently, it is “forever in danger of sliding into another color: red and yellow on either side, brown below.” Without knowing it, I had chosen a color as a toddler that exemplified complexity, one that invited frustration, confusion, awe, and engagement. Orange mirrored the feelings I had about my parents, my queerness, and my upbringing in the Bronx. It was perfect.

At this point, my thesis advisor Aimee Nezhukumatathil said I should check the course catalogue for an art class that might help me explore orange more. I nodded but doubted there would be anything for me there. Yet, right at the top of the art department offerings was Color Theory, offered by Professor Brooke Alexander, who would end up being the third member of my thesis committee evaluating the first draft of Orange.

With Professor Alexander I learned the craziest things about color! I learned that no two people on the planet see the same exact shade or tint of any color, our relationship to and naming of colors changes over time and across cultures in response to dynamic forces, and finally that there is still an ongoing argument as to whether color is REAL OR NOT AT ALL. As the Eckstuts state “wavelengths of light do not exist as color until we see them. Without the eyes and brain, there’s no such thing as color.” Color as we know it is a convenient, simplistic, and appeasing veil for a vast complexity. WHAT?!?!?! God, I’m not even getting into the optical color illusions I learned about that I turned into poetic forms!

Influenced by these revelations, Orange leaned away from clear takeaways and hard facts, instead embracing the nuance and complexity of being in relationship with others.

How did your relationship with your family influence your writing?

I’ve spoken about my parents, but not as much as about the other family that are in this book. Across Orange I write about my cousins, friends, past lovers, tíos, titís, grandparents, and my parent’s friends. I had some worry about having too large a cast of characters but there was a theme of interwoven community that was true of my upbringing which I wanted to convey. My cousins talk to my parents, my titís grow up alongside my grandparents, my friends know my past lovers. My family’s approach to community was interconnection, a sharing of the good and the bad, both grudges and forgiveness, love and harm. I was taught to hold onto those you love and invite them to grow not just with you but with those you love.

This approach influenced the very structure of the book. Poems loop back to previously named characters, show characters interacting with each other, and invite the reader to interact with the poems themselves. I wanted the reader to, hopefully, feel like a part of this story, a sentiment held over from spoken word. Even the size of the book, taller and wider than a standard poetry collection, is a testament to the abundance I want to convey.

What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?

My go-to writing process is basically the snow ball effect, or another way to think of it: fly paper. Once I realized what the focus of my book was: my parent’s divorce, family, queerness, color theory, etc., and that I wanted to use interactive and repetitious forms; I opened myself up to collect anything and everything related to those. Every book I read, poetry or not, every reading or movie or art museum or haunted house or dance party I went to, I let into the process. This worked especially well because Orange has an undercurrent of child-like playfulness and inventiveness.

At the same time, I made a rule for myself: anytime I was given a writing prompt I had to shift it in a way that made it a poem I could possibly put in Orange. Once my snow ball finally reached the bottom of the hill / my fly tape was covered, I had so many poems, so many new forms I had tinkered with, that I never had to worry about having too few poems. I believe at one point I had 122 poems. This is the ideal place I always want to be, cutting poems instead of scrambling to write new ones.

The next part of my process began here, as I realized this was as far as I could go on my own. I cut poems and reordered them into a presentable draft, then I hired three different editors to give me feedback on it. Carrying this feedback, I edited and submitted, edited and submited. With each rejection the manuscript got stronger (and shorter lol) until it finally felt right.

How did writing this book transform you?

I was transformed in largely two ways. The day I received the publishing contract from CavanKerry, I called my parents separately and said “It is time for you to read the book. This is your story too and I am open to your feedback. I can’t promise I will change everything you want changed but I will hear you out and consider it.” I ended up having a two-hour phone call with my mom and a three-hour sit down with my dad.

I went into these conversations believing they were for the book, but really, they were for my parents and I. I had spent four years engaged in the daily act of empathy, where I offered my parents patience, grace, and meticulous understanding. It was a confirmation that I was watching, and listening, forgiving, and accepting. I offered these things because they had taught me to do so, because they have given me the same. Since those talks, I’ve seen our relationship strengthen, as they see me more as a complex adult who sees them as the same. I don’t know what our challenges will be in the future but I know that having had those conversations will make it easier for us to face them.

This book also transformed how I saw actionable accountability. I spent the first two years of this process writing dozens of poems about my parents, their choices, their mistakes, their triumphs. Yet, it got to a point where I realized I needed to the turn the mirror on myself. I started to write poems about my own mistakes in romantic relationships, my own lies that I had told, the myriad ways that I had hurt people I loved. These poems led to real life conversations and confrontations where my friendships were made clearer, I held myself accountable to my past and present partners, and I became a more honest person with my parents.

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, for which they won the 2025 Jesmyn Ward Fiction Prize. Their short story, "This Time and the Next" will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. They have also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, and the Vermont Studio Center. A University of Mississippi MFA graduate, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. Follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.