An Interactive Poetry Workshop with Noel Quiñones

Word Up welcomes Noel Quiñones to celebrate the launch of Orange (out 5/5/26), a bold and tender portrait of family, identity, and truth in the North Bronx. Inspired by this debut poetry collection and their background in spoken word, this workshop will invite participants to create a dynamic form that requires the reader to participate in the poem. Together, you will read some examples of interactive poetry, brainstorm a new poetic form, and write your own poems that require a dynamic exchange between writer and reader.

ORANGE is a joyful, heart-thumping, grief-slick, language-sparkling romp through memory and becoming. Every page is humming with the music of what it means to be alive and brown and queer and brilliant in a world that too often forgets to see you whole. Structured around color theory and anchored in a bold love letter to the body’s brightness, these poems navigate family ruptures, first loves, and the ache of moving towards a future full of rowdy song. 
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, Poem-a-day, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT anthology, as well as 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. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and founder of Project X, a Bronx-based spoken word poetry organization, Noel is currently a poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center. Their debut poetry collection, Orange, will be published May 2026 with CavanKerry Press. You can follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of “family” expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones’s poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove.

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