NYC Book Launch: An Orange Celebration

Featuring poetry readings and musical performances by Jon Sands, Elisabet Velasquez, Alejandro Heredia, Haydil Henriquez, Keren Abreu, and Milteri Tucker w/ Bombazo Dance Company.

Hosted by Gabriel Ramirez.

Introduced by Professor Mariposa Fernández.

With a raffle for Norwood Community Library.

Sponsored by the Lehman College English Department and Women & Gender Studies Program.

Catering will be provided.

Info to Know:

You must present Valid I.D. that shows the same name as the one submitted here to get onto the Lehman College campus.

Enter at Gate 8, located at 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West. Walk straight and when you see the Performing Arts Center, the Library is located behind it. Head downstairs to the Library’s Periodicals Room, Lower Level.

About the Book, Author, and Featured Performers

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. here or get a copy at the event.

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.

Jon Sands is a winner of the National Poetry Series, selected for his second poetry collection, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the facilitator of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing classes with well over 1000 registrants to date. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Rumpus, The Millions, The Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Foundation, and many others, as well as anthologized in The Best American Poetry. He is a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series at Cheryl’s Global Soul in Brooklyn, and has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Elisabet Velasquez is a Boricua writer, mother of two children from Brooklyn, New York, now living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Velasquez uses poetry to share her experiences, growing up in Bushwick, Brooklyn as a first generation Puerto-Rican teen mother and GED recipient. Her love for sharing personal narratives using poetry led her to spoken word, becoming a member of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe National Slam Team in 2009. Her debut young adult novel in verse When We Make It received the Kirkus best YA Fiction Award, YALSA Best fiction for Young Adults award. It went on to be a 2021 Goodreads Readers Choice Nominee, a 2022 Gotham Prize Finalist, and was named a New York Times Young Adult Books To Watch For. Her book has recently been added to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino General Motors Learning Lounge Library. When she is not writing she is living the life she hopes to write about.

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from The Bronx. He is the author of LOCA, a finalist for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel prize, and You’re the Only Friend I Need, winner of the Gold Line Press Fiction chapbook contest. He has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA, the Dominican Studies Institute, Kenyon Review, Trinity College, and UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Heredia currently serves as an artist in residence at Trinity College, where he teaches creative writing.

Born yaí-í-díl; a daydreamer, auntie, warrior. Haydil Henriquez is an Afro-Dominican arts programming educator, cultural worker and Bronx-bred poet. She earned a BA in Psychology & Education from Swarthmore College in 2014. Haydil was the inaugural Bronx Poet Laureate, the Bronx is Reading (2021-2023), and currently serves as Associate Director of Regional Awards at the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. She’s board president of Literary Freedom Project and a creative careers pathway teaching artist at Brooklyn Academy of Music. She completed the Emerging Poets Fellowship at Poet House in 2018, the Cave Canem: Portals into Language Writing Fellowship in 2020, and Las Musas Books Hermanas Mentorship Program in 2020. Haydil’s work is published in Best Teen Writing of 2008, Cutbank Literary Journal, Rigorous Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, ¡Pa'lante!, TroubleMaker FireStarter and the Worcestor Review. Her debut poetry collection received the Audre Lorde Dignidad Literaria Award, Get Fresh Books Publishing.

Gabriel Ramirez, author of IF PIT BULLS HAD A GOD, IT’D BE A PIT BULL is a Queer Afro-Caribbean writer and educator. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal and a 2024-2025 CantoMundo Poetry Coalition Fellow. Gabriel has received support from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Miami Book Fair, The Watering Hole, and Callaloo. You can find their work in publications like Muzzle Magazine, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, Poetry Magazine, BOMB, Acentos Review and others as well as Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (Library of America 2024). Learn more at @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com.

Keren Abreu is a singer-songwriter whose music is a multilingual blend of folk lyricism, pop melodies, and powerhouse vocals. Born and raised in the Bronx, New York and the proud daughter of Dominican immigrants, Keren’s musical journey has taken her from the pulpit of her childhood church to sold-out venues across New York City. ÉXITO, her debut EP released in 2020, is a 5-song exploration and celebration of queerness, afro-latinidad, spirituality, and the people and places she calls home.

Bombazo is New York’s leading Bomba dance company. A 501(c)- 3 non-profit drum and dance organization, whose mission is to preserve, educate and showcase traditional Bomba and Afro Caribbean and traditional folkloric elements. We further combine those main ingredients and fusing them with classical, contemporary and social styles of dance. Thus, creating a new movement vocabulary while still preserving the authenticity of our culture. Bombazo has had the distinction to perform at Lincoln Center, Summer Stage, City Center, BAAD, Hostos Performing Arts Center, Pregones Theater, among many other venues. Internationally in Santiago De Cuba, and Mexico. Bombazo has been featured in spanish network Univison comercial: “Herencia Puertorriquena” and in Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights” Themovie releasing Summer 2020.

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