FREE Author Talk with Poet Octavio Quintanilla, Wednesday, February 19th, 2025
A Free Monthly Online Lecture Series from WritingWorkshops.com & Gemini Ink
Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, via Zoom@ 7PM CST (Add to Cart to RSVP for Free)
Up Next: A conversation with Octavio Quintanilla, to discuss his new book, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press); moderated by Monique Quintana.
“‘I want to think where I’m going will be free of borders,’ Quintanilla writes. These poems—informed by an artist’s eye, the art shifted by a poet’s vision—refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow.”
—Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon
“Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh/spirit.”
—Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize for Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes
“With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum.”
—Norma E. Cantú, author of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers
In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.
Poet Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.
Moderator Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, The Community of Writers, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Storyknife. You can find her at moniquequintana.com
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Previously: We featured Ramona Reeves:
The Big Texas Author Talk is a *free* lecture series devoted to showcasing Texas authors from across our big state. Each month we feature one Texas author in conversation with another—from New York Times bestsellers living in Dallas, Houston, and Austin to our rich Texas Latinx border authors living in Laredo and McAllen, not to mention from other deep pockets and corners of our culturally diverse state.
Our lecture series is as entertaining as it is informative—and like Texas itself, we offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of our extremely distinct Lone Star State and continue to keep us on the literary map.
In the past, we’ve featured novelists such as Kathleen Kent, Marisol Cortez, Joe Lansdale, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Texas poet laureates such as Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Brown, and Emmy Perez.
If you’ve visited with us over the last three years, you know who we are and what we do, and we thank you for your ongoing support. We value your presence and love seeing your faces!
If you’re new to the Big Texas Author Talk and are just discovering who we are and what we do, we welcome you to join us virtually on the third Wednesday of every month at 7 pm CST.
PREVIOUS AUTHORS/TITLES INCLUDE
- Debut Novelist Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
- Edgar-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
- Winner of the Iowa Prize for Nonfiction Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
- 2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Perez: With The River on Our Face
- New York Times Bestselling Author Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
- Critically Acclaimed Novelist David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well
- Award-Winning writer Antonio Ruiz-Camacho's Barefoot Dogs
- San Antonio Poet Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson's She Lives in Music
- Debut Novelist Heather Harper Ellett: Ain't Nobody Nobody
- Amanda Eyre Ward's New York Times bestselling novel The Jetsetters
- Jenny Browne's New and Selected Poems
- Rebekah Manley's Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates
- Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
- Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
- Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
- Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
- Sergio Troncoso's, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
- Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
- Marisol Cortez, Luz at Midnight
- Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
- Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
- Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
- Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
- Wondra Chang, Sonju
- Alexandra van de Kamp, Ricochet Script
- Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten The Rattlesnake
- Carmen Tafolla, The Last Butterfly/La Ultima Mariposa, illustrated by Regina Moya
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau: A Novel.
- Daniel Peña, Bang
- Tomás Q. Morín, Let Me Count the Ways
- Allison Hedge Coke, Look at this Blue
- Vincent Cooper, Zarzamora
- Leticia Urieta, Las Criaturas
- Steve Adams, Remember This
- Andrew Porter, The Disappeared
- Novelist Rubén Degollado's The Family Izquierdo (W.W. Norton, 2022).
- Thomas H. McNeely's story collection, Pictures of the Shark.
- Katie Gutierrez's novel, More Than You'll Ever Know
- Carmen Tafolla's novel, Warrior Girl
- Rudy Ruiz's novel, Valley of Shadows
- Mag Gabbert, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS
- Alex Temblador, Writing an Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers