Octavio Quintanilla is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival VersoFrontera; publisher of Alabrava Press; and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University. He is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows, which was recently Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Book Festival Author
Octavio Quintanilla
More About Octavio Quintanilla
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The Book of Wounded Sparrows
In "The Book of Wounded Sparrows," his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently—a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation.
In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that—more than a narrative of loss—it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self.
