Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which has been longlisted for the American Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets, forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Other poems by Octavio Quintanilla in Verse Daily:
January 4, 2010:   "Love Poem with Exiles" "The dogs are mute and wait for daybreak...."
July 11, 2009:   "Unburdening" "I wait for you in a room..."

Other poems on the web by Octavio Quintanilla:
"In This Country"
"Tell Them Love Is Found"
Three poems
Three poems

Octavio Quintanilla's Website.

Octavio Quintanilla on Twitter.

About The Book of Wounded Sparrows:

"Octavio Quintanilla's The Book of Wounded Sparrows is simply a beautiful book, a lyrical journey within and through memory, language, identity, country, grief, family, and so much more. I'm particularly drawn to the gorgeous original artwork in the book—a combination of text and language, where mark-making begins to blend and interact with the mark-making of the poems. But mostly, I sense that this book is about absence and the ways in which the speaker tries to grapple with that absence, how to turn it, fill it, reshape it, draw it, but ultimately, the speaker knows silence can't be shaped, as Quintanilla writes: 'My relationship with language is absence, / one I can't shape with my hands.'"
—Victoria Chang

"In his long-awaited second collection of visual art and poetry, The Book of Wounded Sparrows, Octavio Quintanilla documents the tangled losses of migration by way of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a minor. Through finely cast poems whose lines cut and are cut as if with the thinnest of blades, Quintanilla tunes our witnessing to the loneliness and emotional costs of a child separated from his birth family, country, and tongue. To experience displacement at any age is to exist between languages, cultures, and familiars, and he captures this condition exquisitely: 'You don't know yet that a contraction is a visual form of separation: m amá.' To be of both is to also never be whole: 'English is never enough. / Spanish is never enough.' Quintanilla's artwork splices the collection's poem sections, and I'm struck by the process of reading text and art separately and together, allowing the interplay of the resonant '[d]istance between blood cells.' This is a tenderly assembled book with hungers and thirsts I traced as if tracing my own."
—Diana Khoi Nguyen

"The Book of Wounded Sparrows is an exquisite cartography of countries both real and imagined that cannot be bridged by a solitary body. 'Poetry remembers that distance can be made of suffering,' Quintanilla writes, and so the narrator shatters himself into a hundred pieces—grieving boy, lost man, wounded sparrow and wild dog all at once—and tells us, 'The sea forgives us / even if we don't want to be / forgiven.' Quintanilla understands that the work of the poet is to mourn, to remember, to pray, to dream, and beyond that, to collapse time and space and being, rendering ourselves whole, 'I want to ask my wife to hold me, / hold me, I want to say, / until all my flesh burnsoff // and all that's left is light.'"
—ire'ne lara silva

"Octavio Quintanilla unites, with striking clarity and effortless cohesion, stanzas in search of things unbroken, a desire for lost plenitudes—ancestry, whereabouts, language—the poet's personal archive of childhood letters, and his practice as an accomplished painter. In poems, paintings, and meditations on method, he animates each occasion with a distinct understanding of grid and coloration; with the volume and shadows that structure memory: 'What word to pack a wound? / What wound to fill a mouth?' This superb book fuses syllables and mark-making to match the two fires of affiliation, ever troubled by the complicity of one's own name, and the cause of that unsparing eviction. 'How many times have you dipped / your hand into the mirror / and tried to touch the last ripples / of what you are ceasing to be?'"
—Roberto Tejada

"Former Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2018-2020), author of If I Go Missing (Slough, 2014), and creator of a colorful series of visual poems, Frontextos (a blend of frontera and texto—border/text), Quintanilla returns with his second book, about which the author says: 'It has taken approximately ten years to say, in less than 100 pages, what I've been wanting to say since I first started writing in English.'"
—Diego Báez