EXPLORING BIG QUESTIONS THROUGH POETRY

2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
| Location of Session: Salazar Gallery
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 3:45 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

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About the Event

How can poetry be a vehicle to explore life’s larger questions, from religion to identity, immigration, and nature? Two San Antonio poets, collaborators, and community members will discuss their new collections of poetry to answer that question. Natalia Treviño’s When You Were Human offers perspective on identity through the Virgin Mary and examines her role in uniting people around the world. National Book Award Longlister Octavio Quintanilla’s Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (cotranslated with Treviño) takes us on a profound journey to explore what it means to belong.

About the Authors

Photo Credit: Brenda Bazán SABF

Octavio Quintanilla

Octavio Quintanilla was the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing; The Book of Wounded Sparrows, which was Longlisted for the National Book Award; and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

Octavio is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera, the publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

Photo Credit: Angie Contini

Natalia Treviño

Natalia Treviño has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Menada Literary Award from the Ditet e Naimit Poetry Festival in Macedonia. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Macondo Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Academy of American Poets Ambroggio Prize for cotranslating Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours. She is the author of VirginX and Lavando la Dirty Laundry. Her work has been anthologized in Inheritance of Light: Contemporary Poetry; Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers; Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry; and published in journals including Poetry, Plume, The Southern Poetry Anthology, BorderSenses, Sugar House Review, and riverSedge.

She is joining us at the Book Festival for her two new books: a novel, The Road Back, and a poetry collection, When You Were Human.

Moderator

Nan Cuba

Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread, winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction. Cuba coedited Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists and published other work in places such as Antioch Review, Harvard Review, Columbia, and Chicago Tribune’s Printer’s Row. She is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and teaches in the MA/MFA Program in Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Justice at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where she is writer-in-residence.