Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning writer of all genres from the Bronx. Noel is the author of the interactive poetry collection Orange (CavanKerry Press, May 2026) and 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. Noel has written for, narrated, and acted in several films, including the Emmy nominated documentary Takeover, recounting the Young Lords’ 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to fight for better healthcare. They have also received fellowships from Periplus, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, the Watering Hole, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and ELVTR’s Video Game Writer Course, Noel is currently a Justice for My Sister BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab Fellow working on their first TV show, The Telescope. Follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com. This interview was conducted by Marianne Manzler, Reader, Poetry.
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Marianne Manzler: These poems in Orange aren’t afraid to address trauma, difficult topics, take up space, say the hard thing, and linger in uncertainty. How do hybrid and innovative structures provide shelter or a means for this kind of exploration? How do you go to your personal “pit” when writing about the past, and how do you bring yourself back?
Noel Quiñones: When I think about hybrid and innovative structures, I’m thinking about the feelings they elicit. When you see a new form, my hope is that you are experiencing some level of awe or questioning or trepidation. This form is asking me to read it in a different, new way. I am interested in and deeply love the feeling of trepidation, awe, and maybe low levels of confusion that a hybrid form elicits because it mirrors memory itself. I do not remember all of these things 100%. I’m even thinking about the scientific fact that every time you try to remember a memory, it gets fuzzier. That is a fact about how our brains work, and so I think they provide a shelter that I don’t fully remember. A fine line between truth and poetic truth. I’m dealing with a lot of memories. I’m dealing with a lot of other people’s memories. When I think about going to my personal pit, I am bolstered by the fact that I don’t have to remember everything, and I don’t have to remember exactly how it happened. I believe in communal writing to a certain extent. I had a lot of tough conversations with my parents because a lot of these moments are about their lives, their divorce, their hurts, their harms, and I have to balance that with how this affected me, how I remember. I changed things based on these conversations. These forms allow for some level of uncertainty that is built into how we think about memory and time and place.
The whole structure of this book hinges on color theory, and how color theory is an argument that there are still many things we don’t understand about color, but we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel safer. We say, hey, red means anger, blue means sadness. Everyone sees the same types of these colors. This is what this color means, but that’s factually inaccurate. Colors change regularly across generations. No two people on the planet see the same shade of any single color. There’s still an argument about whether color is real or not. All of this is helping when I have to go to that pit and talk about really tough things. I want to get to this feeling, and my goal with this whole book is to show: it’s complicated. There’s no right or wrong, there’s no person who made all the right choices, no person who made all the wrong choices. That’s also why I included poems about my own relationships and how I’ve messed up.
MM: Blockbuster, FYE, Game Stop — all beloved, nostalgic institutions of the ’80s and ’90s and early ’00s — make an appearance in “My Neighborhood Map,” and Blockbuster in “Blockbuster Fever,” which orients us to this coming-of-age story and the familial dynamics in this particular moment of time. How was the experience of writing those poems? Movies and movie theatres are also a mode and space of intergenerational communication and connection for this immigrant family. How does place, memory, and time shape this collection?
NQ: I’ve been told that a lot of my work is cinematic, and I’m obsessed with movies in the Bronx. In the “Blockbuster Fever” poem, I talk about how my parents met working in a movie theater, and how movie theaters were such a big part of my childhood and my life now. I still am big into movie theaters, and how they are this third space for people to go and engage in containers of stories. These places allow you to dip into all these other lives and times through the movies themselves. I started looking into the history of movie theaters in the Bronx, and how there were over twenty movie theaters in the Bronx in the ’50s and ’60s that have been gutted over time. There’s one that’s really special to me that is not in this map, sadly, but right next to the pet store, there was a 99 cent store that I always thought had a weird shape because you would walk in and the floor would dip, as you go deeper inside, with a balcony above—like what kind of 99 cent store is this?—and I found that it was shaped like that because it used to be a movie theater, but it’s since been gutted. I love movie theaters and think about how we’ve been denied them in the Bronx specifically, as you have to travel so far to go to the movies.
MM: Many of these poems are instructive and teach us how to navigate this collection as we go, from the choose-your-adventure approach of “Custody” to the reflective activity of “The Burke Bridge Trail,” which asks the reader to hold the poem up to a mirror in order to read it and be an embodied, active participant, rather than a passive recipient. How does your teaching and writing intersect?
NQ: This book is a love letter to teaching and education. My mom taught first and second grade in the South Bronx for twenty-nine years. I knew very early on that I was going to be a teacher. I am still teaching. I am interested in what happens when we interrogate teaching as a relationship model, and the ways that you can fall into the trap of — the student is an empty vessel. I’m going to teach you everything. My word is bond. My word is fact. That’s one way of teaching that I’ve experienced and that I have also fallen into as a teacher. In another approach, I’m teaching the student, but this student is actually teaching me. As a student and teacher, I want this dynamic to be active, embodied, back and forth. I wanted this book to be both instructive and an invitation. It’s an invitation to go a little further to deepen the reader’s relationship with this book. You will never have the same lived experiences that I have had, but perhaps in having to choose which box in custody to start the poem, you can understand how hard it was for me to choose: where am I sleeping tonight? Will I stay with my mom, my dad, or my grandparents? Where do I begin? Where do I call home?
In the “Burke Bridge Trail,” you have to hold it up to a mirror. You are also looking at yourself in that mirror. What does that mean? Clearly, something is being hidden, right? To answer this, you have to look at yourself. You have to have some kind of deeper reflection. Those are a few ways that I think about what good education can do. It helps us to go a little slower, reflect, to reread, return, to ask questions. I wanted this book to be a testament to the power and the pitfalls of teaching. With all the instructions and directions, there is this question of trust. And it’s true. As a teacher, I am often giving so many instructions that I’m actually not allowing enough exploration and engagement from the student, and I wanted that tension to appear in this book.
MM: What writers or artists inspire you? Who do you carry with you?
NQ: A huge influence on this book was Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches. I read it during my master’s program, and it’s a document of her childhood in Chicago and uses touchstones of nostalgia and her childhood to do so formally. Another is Olio by Tyehimba Jess, as I think about what is possible, world-building, and while I’m not doing the historical reclamation that he’s doing, I wanted to use form in a way that makes someone feel something. Beyond writers, there’s the TV show On My Block. It’s a Netflix show about three middle-school kids and the adventures they go on.
I think a lot about Tato Laviera, one of the founding Nuyorican poets, when I think about sound, when I think about capturing voice. I’m a third-generation Nuyorican. What he was doing with Spanish and Spanglish, and seeing it as its own legitimate language, seeing his work as a Nuyorican, was a gift. Many people told us that to be an immigrant, to be of two worlds was a bad thing, and that you would always be stuck and never accepted anywhere. His work has always reminded me to see this as an opportunity. You have access to two spaces, two languages, and you can mix and match and do exciting things with language that should be welcomed and celebrated. That’s an ancestor I carry with me.
MM: What are you currently reading?
NQ: I’m reading a lot of poetry. I’m reading my friend’s book, Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate, which explores formal innovation for the disabled community and communities thinking about accessibility. That book is a 3-D model of a museum for disability rights, and it’s beautiful in the ways that he’s thinking about structure and form.
MM: How did you go about revision for this collection? As a debut author, any advice for emerging poets?
NQ: It’s going to take a long time. I started this in 2019. So this book took four to five years to write and went through thirty or forty revisions. A few pieces of advice: you need other readers. I am so grateful that I had the eyes of my fellow poet-friends look at my work when I couldn’t. Seeing those moments as an invitation. I made a rule for myself that every time I sent out the book for publication and it was rejected, that was an invitation to revise. I’ll never forget what a friend said to me when I asked if I should let this go, they said to ask myself two questions: Am I still having fun? Am I still learning, whether about myself or the poems? If the question is yes, then keep revising. Keep going.
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