Book Talk: Orange with Noel Quiñones

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

Noel Quiñones will be joined in conversation with Chicago poet Tara Betts for a discussion of Noel's latest poetry collection, Orange! Q&A and discussion to follow.

About the Book & Author

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 and O. Henry award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their work 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. They have also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, the Poetry Foundation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. 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 poet in residence with the Chicago Poetry Center.

Tara Betts lives in Chicago and is the author of the manuscript “Refuse to Disappear,” as well as Break the Habit (Trio House Press, 2016) and Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies and compilations such as Red Line: Chicago Horror Stories and Octavia's Brood.