The Book of Wounded Sparrows: Poems

2024 National Book Award Longlist in Poetry

In The Book of Wounded Sparrows, his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently--a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation.

In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that--more than a narrative of loss--it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self.

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Midway Journal, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and elsewhere. His poetry and Frontextos can be found at the San Antonio Labor Plaza, and at Poet’s Point, a San Antonio community space.

Octavio’s visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, TX, El Paso Museum of Art, Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, TX.

Octavio is the Founder and Director of the Literature and Arts Festival, VersoFrontera, and the Founder and Publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.