Book Talk: Orange with Noel Quiñones & T.S. Leonard

Join us as we welcome award-winning poet Noel Quiñones in celebration of their debut poetry collection, Orange!

Noel Quiñones will be joined in conversation by Bay Area poet T.S. Leonard for a discussion on Orange! Q&A to follow.

About the Book & Authors

A bold and tender portrait of family, identity, and truth in the North Bronx.

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.

Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning writer of all genres. 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. Noel’s short story "This Time and the Next" will be included in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners. Noel has also 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. 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 Justice for My Sister BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab Fellow working on their first TV show, The Telescope. Follow Noel at www.noelpquinones.com.

T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and author of works published in Foglifter, Poetry, and Fourteen Poems. Leonard’s debut poetry collection, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, was selected for the 2024-2025 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and will be published in 2026 by Fordham University Press. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

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